HE PRESBYTER 




FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 




BX 



BY 

WILLIAM R. RICHARDS 
D.D 



Class :3iX\l33_ 
CopightN" 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



1 




William R. Richards, D.D. 



Zhc preebijtenan pulpit -r^'^ 

* 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



WILLIAM R.'rICHARDS, D. D. 

Pastor of The Brick Church, New York 



The word is very nigh unto thee, . . . 
that thou mayest do it. 



PHILADELPHIA 

PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION 
AND SABBATH-SCHOOL WORK 



1902 



THE LIBR^f^Y'OTi 
CONGRESS, I 

Two CiJmtis Recfc-(V€t>j 

on b 

cory a 



Copyright, 1902, by the Trustees of 
The Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath- 
School Work. 



Published November, 1902. 



PUBLISHERS' ANNOUNCEMENT 



This is one of a series of sermons entitled, 
" The Presbyterian Pulpit," which will be issued 
from time to time during the coming months. 
Each volume will contain eight sermons. The 
preachers selected are those who are well known 
and whose sermons have been greatly blessed. 
The first of the series contains eight sermons 
preached by George Tybout Purves, D.D., LL.D. 
The second contains eight sermons of the Rev. 
William R. Richards, D.D., Pastor of The Brick 
Church, New York city. Two other volumes 
will be issued during the autumn — one furnished 
by President M. Woolsey Stryker, D.D., LL.D., 
and another by Prof Herrick Johnson, D.D., LL.D. 
These will be followed by other volumes from time 
to time. 



V 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. The Brother for Whom Christ Died . 3 
II. A Complaint and an Answer . . -23 

III. The Monotony of Sin . . . .43 

IV. The Three Taverns : A Missionary 

Sermon ...... 61 

V. The Power of Personality : A Word to 

Students 81 

VI. "But if Not" loi 

VII. "The Gates of the City" . . .121 
VIII. The Home of the Soul . . . .141 



vii 



I 



THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST 
DIED 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
I 

THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 

" And through thy knowledge shall the weak brother perish, 
for whom Christ died?" — i Corinthians viii. ii. 

"The brother for whom Christ died." What an 
extraordinary thing to say ! Did the Son of God 
then risk His Hfe for the sake of some one man ? 
For us the words may have lost the sound of 
strangeness through long use in the familiar lan- 
guage of hymn and prayer : " I gave My life for 
thee " ; " Rock of ages, cleft for me." But has 
the thought grown perfectly familiar to you ? 
If perchance you had never heard the sound of 
the words before, might it not now seem strange 
and audacious, if some one should tell you that 
the Lord Jesus died for the sake of one man ? 

If it were said that Christ died for the whole 
world, we could more easily believe it, for the 
whole world is a very large thought. All those 
innumerable people through all the generations 

3 



4 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



who make up the people of the whole world — 
there is an immensity about it that staggers one's 
reason. You seem to be dealing with almost in- 
finite quantities. Even Caiaphas, the high priest, 
in his mood of heartless calculation could say : 
" It is expedient that one man should die for 
the people, and that the whole nation perish not." 

Oh, but this word of Paul's is very different 
—not so easily credible ! See that weak brother 
over there, whom you have been slighting as a 
somewhat contemptible character. " Be careful," 
Paul says ; the man is worth more than you 
think ; that is the very man for whom Jesus 
Christ died on the cross." So far as I know, 
Paul was the first of the apostles to put the amaz- 
ing thought into words, that Christ cared enough 
for any one man to give His life for him. 

It would be interesting if we could know how 
Paul himself ever came to believe such a thing 
and dared to say it. For really something like 
this hard faith is what we all most sorely need 
for our comfort to-day, — to be able to believe in 
a God who can have such care for men, one by 
one, such personal affection toward one man. Is 
there such a God ? It is the great question that 
is likely to confront any of us some day, in time 
of trouble, when we look up into the sky, and 



THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 5 



say : " Is there any one there — can I be sure there 
is — who cares for me ?" 

A distinguished scientific writer of our time, 
the father of so-called agnosticism, lost a little 
child whom he loved devotedly. A friend of his, 
the late Canon Kingsley, wrote to the afflicted 
father, trying to comfort him with thoughts of 
God. But the answer, while perfectly courteous, 
was one of the saddest letters a man ever wrote. 
Mr. Huxley said that to him all other religious 
questions seemed matters of comparatively small 
moment in the face of the impassable gulf be- 
tween the anthropomorphism of theology and the 
passionless impersonality of the unknown and 
unknowable which science shows everywhere 
under the thin veil of phenomena." That is to 
say. Christians have believed in a God in some 
way like ourselves, a Father in heaven who loves 
us and cares for us as we care for one another — 
that is anthropomorphism : while all that this 
scientist could find underneath the visible world 
was an unknown and unknowable something, 
a "passionless impersonality," like the force of 
gravity or electricity, mysterious, everywhere 
present, awful ; but you could not possibly love 
it, or pray to it, or count on its sympathy. 

It goes its way, majestic, relentless ; but if you 



6 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



cross its path it will destroy you in a moment, 
with no care for you, or your joy, or pain, or life, 
or death. It is a " passionless impersonality," — 
that was all Mr. Huxley could find where Chris- 
tians have looked for God. So he said there 
was an impassable gulf between his way of think- 
ing and their way of thinking. He was right ; it 
is an impassable gulf. Now the question is. How 
has any one ever been able to pass over that im- 
passable gulf? 

There might be some one in this room who had 
been standing on the dark side of that gulf; how 
would it be possible for him to pass over to the 
bright side, and begin to believe in a personal 
God, a Father in heaven? 

Now our text comes from a man who had 
crossed that gulf that separates agnosticism from 
faith. His feet are planted firmly on the other 
side of it. The unseen Being was not a passion- 
less impersonality to Paul. For what he thought 
of God was all bound up in what he knew of the 
Lord Jesus Christ ; and here in our text he says, 
" Shall the weak brother perish, for whom Christ 
died ?" He is speaking of some weak brother 
in the Corinthian Church ; some particularly un- 
important member, a man of no account, as we 
say, a sort of nonentity. Even the kindest hearted 



THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 7 



and most charitable people there would be apt 
to say of him that it would be httle loss if he 
dropped out; really he was hardly worth the 
trouble of writing his name over on the roll, 
when they got out a new edition of the year 
book. That is the man Paul is talking about — a 
weak brother; but it is this weak brother and 
Christ; and he says — what did he say? That 
Christ cared more for the weak brother than we 
seem to care for him ? That Christ would have 
done more for the weak brother, or borne more 
from him than we seem willing to do or bear? 
That Christ loved this weak brother better than 
we seem to love him ? All that would have 
been true, certainly, but that was not quite what 
Paul wrote ; he puts his meaning into a phrase 
far stronger than any of those. It is that that 
weak brother is the man Christ died for. Human 
language cannot go farther than that. Oh, what 
an impassable gulf there is between such a be- 
liever in Christ and that hopeless father who, 
looking up in his anguish, could find no trace 
of any God who really cared what became of his 
dear little child. Paul believes in a Christ who 
cared so much about that little child that He died 
for him. Now my question is. How did Paul 
learn to believe that ? how did he cross the im- 



8 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



passable gulf so successfully ? how did he get his 
feet planted so firmly in faith in a Lord who 
cared enough for each one of us to die for us ? 

Well, Paul's faith in Christ began somehow in 
that vision of which we read in The Acts, when he 
was journeying to Damascus and saw the Hght 
and heard the voice calHng him by name. That 
was an event which meant so much to Paul, and 
Paul has counted for so much in the creation of 
Christian belief in other men's minds through all 
the ages since, that we are apt to name his con- 
version among the great events in the world's 
reHgious history, second only to the great events 
in the life and death of Christ Himself But of 
course the conversion was only the beginning of 
his faith ; and we know very well that such a man 
would never be content to stop with a beginning. 
It was never his way to think that he had already 
attained. So long as he lived he was always for- 
getting the things behind, and reaching forth to 
the things before, and pressing toward the mark, 
that he might know Christ. So our question is 
not about his conversion, but about his progres- 
sion in the Christian faith, how he ever came to 
know Christ well enough to say of Him the ex- 
traordinary thing that he says in this letter to 
the Corinthians, that Christ died for that weak 



THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 9 



brother. How did Paul get so far as that in 
believing in Christ's care for us ? 

Well, to answer this we ought to look into the 
letter itself, and see just what the writer was talk- 
ing about when he said this thing ; what the actual 
course of thought was that led up at last to such 
an extraordinary statement. How did he come to 
be talking about that weak brother at all ? 

If you look back through this eighth chapter, 
you will find that it is not a treatise on theological 
mystery — not at all. It is not as if a man had sat 
down to argue about the existence of God, or the 
person of our Lord Jesus Christ. The chapter is 
directly and intensely practical. That question, 
so troublesome in those days, about eating meat 
offered in an idol temple, had come up. Some of 
the Corinthians were intelligent enough to see that 
this meat was as good as any other. The idol 
could not possibly hurt it, for the idol was nothing 
at all, only a dead block of wood or stone. But 
there were others in the church not so intelligent, 
who could not yet see all that; and if they should 
be led on by their neighbor's example to eat that 
meat it would be against their own conscience, and 
therefore for them a kind of sin. 

These weak brothers are an exasperating lot of 
people. With their irrational scruples, it is easy 



lo FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 

to despise them, and to say impatiently that you 
do not care what becomes of them and their absurd 
conscience. But Paul says : " You must not do 
that." He says : " I would rather not eat another 
bit of meat as long as I live than do that poor 
fellow any harm. I am always putting myself out 
in all possible ways to keep people like him from 
harm : every day of my hfe I am becoming all 
things to all men, in the hope of saving some of 
them." That is the substance of this chapter; it 
is full of practical Christian advice as to the care 
that they must show for one another, care for each 
member of the church, even for the very weakest 
brother of all. 

Now, right in the midst of that commonplace 
practical counsel, he throws out this thunderbolt 
of a theological statement : " Christ died for that 
weak brother." Do you not see how it was that 
Paul worked up to this statement ? Do you not 
catch his unconscious logic ? Can you not trace 
the lines of that bridge which actually led him 
over that impassable gulf from agnosticism to 
trust ? Why Paul learned to believe in a Christ 
who cared so much for men, by caring so much 
for men himself — that was the bridge. It had 
been the one business of this man's life for years, 
the thing he had thrown himself into with all the 



THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED ii 



intensity of his nature, — to care for men ; caring 
for them one by one, taking infinite pains to know 
them, studying out their individual peculiarities, 
making allowance for all their weaknesses, making 
the most of all their excellences, working for them 
when present and thinking and worrying about 
them when absent—" the care of all the churches " 
was on him. " My little children," he writes to 
one specially troublesome group of them, " of 
whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed 
in you" — he cared so much for them. He used 
to pray for them one by one. I do not know to 
how many of these churches and individuals he 
writes that he remembers them daily in his prayers. 

He cared for them with an individual particu- 
larity of interest, one by one. His sympathies had 
been growing strong and deep and broad. His 
heart had grown by exercise large enough to take 
in all these many friends of his, these his many 
spiritual children, so that each of them had his 
own place in Paul's affection. Some of you may 
have in your own home a half dozen children ; 
but each has his own place in your affection ; you 
love each one as if no others were there. Now it 
was hardly a figure of speech for Paul to call the 
many converts in his many churches his spiritual 
children, — all of them ; telling each one that he 



12 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



cared for him as if he were the only one, as if no 
others were there to care for. This was the man 
who, after all these years of exercising his own 
heart in caring for others, had at last come to 
believe in a Lord who might care enough for each 
one of us to die for us. " Through thy knowledge 
shall the weak brother perish, for whom Christ 
died?" 

You see Paul's rule for learning how to believe, 
if he drew it from his own experience, would be a 
very practical rule. It was by much doing that 
he had grown so strong and triumphant in believ- 
ing. The Master Himself had said : " He that 
doeth the will shall know of the doctrine " ; this 
servant had been doing, and he had come to know 
and believe. So, if we take Paul for our architect 
for that bridge which shall carry any of us over 
the impassable gulf from agnosticism to faith, he 
will show us that the bridge must be built up 
soHdly, stone by stone, of simple deeds of loving 
care for others, a care like that which we had 
wanted some God to show toward us. 

The text is thrown into the chapter by way of 
argument; Paul argues from Christ's treatment 
of the weak brother to the treatment that we 
ought to show him. If Christ died for him we 
ought at least to take some pains not to injure 



THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 13 

him. That is the conscious logic of it, and any 
one can see that this argument had, and ought to 
have, tremendous power in shaping Paul's own 
daily conduct. There is another logic in the 
matter, unconscious perhaps, but very powerful, 
working the other way — not from Christ on to 
Paul, but from Paul back to Christ. Here is the 
visible phenomenon of Paul himself giving his life 
in loving care for others — and of course he did 
not stand alone in it. We only name him as a 
specially conspicuous representative of a great 
class of people then and since who have been con- 
trolled by the same motive of loving service. 
Now, you take him as the starting point of your 
argument ; what shall be the conclusion of it ? 
Here you see the visible effect ; what must be the 
unseen cause ? For you know we are constantly 
using logic in both these ways, reasoning from 
known causes forward to future effects, and also 
reasoning from present observed effects back to 
unknown causes. When we started with Christ 
and His cross as a known cause, then the logical 
effect ought to be a life somewhat like Paul's. 
But now, on the other hand, if you did not yet 
know the cause, starting with Paul's life, or any 
similar life, as a visible effect, and reasoning back- 
ward logically, you ask, What is the cause of 



14 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 

such a life ? And you may ask, and keep on ask- 
ing, but you will never get a satisfactory answer 
until you find it in something like the divine love 
of Christ. 

This world-wide phenomenon of Christian self- 
sacrifice, where one is willingly giving his life for 
others, living for them daily, sometimes dying 
for them — is going on everywhere. Amidst the 
cruelty, the selfishness, the heartless competition, 
the hard struggle for existence, which have made 
up so much of the history of the world, — in the 
midst of all these you find this very different phe- 
nomenon of willing sacrifice, this loving care of 
one for another. This is the observed fact among 
us creatures ; but what is the cause of it ? Why, 
you must look for the cause somewhere back in 
the heart of the Creator. God's love for us is the 
cause of all our loving one another. It may work 
in the hearts of some who never heard of the 
gospel, but it comes from God. It was the love 
of Christ that constrained Paul to his loving care 
of the brethren. Paul used this logic about him- 
self, though it might be unconsciously ; and every 
time he did a kindness for one of these fellow- 
Christians it made him a little surer of the reahty 
of Christ's love for them all, until at last he could 
make this astounding declaration, throwing it in 



THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 15 

quite as a matter of course : " Look at that weak 
brother over there ; take good care of him ; that 
is the man Christ died for." 

So, if you were talking with a man who had no 
faith in a personal God, and mourned that he had 
not — as Huxley told Kingsley that he envied 
him, confessing himself on the dark side of the 
impassable gulf, where he could find no power 
back of the visible world except a ''passionless 
impersonality" — if you really want to help him 
toward faith, show him the life of some Christian 
hke Paul, who has really given himself to the 
work of helping and saving others because he 
cares so much for each of them. Better yet if 
you can find one still living. And when your 
friend has looked long enough at this spectacle 
to be somewhat interested and attracted by what 
he sees, then persuade him to go and do some of 
it himself Enlist him in the same kind of loving 
service. Get him to caring for his neighbors, and 
putting himself out to serve them, until each of 
them begins to seem to him worth caring for. 

I am sure before your friend has gone very far 
in that kind of action he will find that the other 
shore of the impassable gulf draws nearer; and 
where he used to talk about a " passionless imper- 
sonality," it begins to seem easier for him now to 



i6 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 

look up and say, " Our Father." If the man goes 
on far enough in that kind of action, and hand in 
hand with such a companion as the apostle Paul, 
really throwing his life into the same kind of self- 
forgetful service, willing to take great pains for 
each unfortunate brother whom he could hope to 
help, some day, I think, these strange words of 
Paul's will come back to him ; — only the man will 
learn with a start that the words no longer seem 
strange to him : " That weak brother for whom 
Christ died." " Why, of course," he says to him- 
self, "that explains it. That is the reason why 
I have been caring so much for the poor fellow. 
It was the Lord all the while who was moving 
my heart to care for him : the Lord who Himself 
cared for him enough to die for him." 

So now the man finds himself safely across the 
impassable gulf He has been doing the will, and 
has come to know of the doctrine that it is of 
God. 

Since writing these words, I have seen an utter- 
ance from Professor Francis G. Peabody, of Cam- 
bridge, which I should like to quote to you : 
" No sign of the times is more instructive than 
the effect of social service upon social life. The 
critics, the philosophers, and the lookers on are 
afflicted just now with an epidemic of social 



THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 17 

pessimism. Political methods seem debauched, 
municipal conditions degenerate, the burden of 
poor-relief increasing, and the tone of prosperous 
life degraded by commerciaHsm, until, as Matthew 
Arnold said, * The upper classes grow materialized, 
and the middle classes vulgarized, and the lower 
classes brutalized/ And meantime who are the 
social optimists ? They are the people who, as 
Kipling says, are doing things. . . . Social service 
renews social life. He that wills to do the will 
comes to know the doctrine. He that loses him- 
self for others' sakes comes to find his own life 
worth the living. . . . The secret of the worth 
and significance of life is hidden from the many 
who are wise and prudent and disclosed to those 
who lend a hand." 

There are many persons in the community who 
would not call themselves agnostics, for they have 
never thought of doubting the existence of a per- 
sonal God as He is revealed in the Bible : but 
what they cannot yet believe with any comforting 
assurance is that this God has any loving care for 
them. They have never learned, — or if they once 
knew they have now forgotten, — how to say, " My 
God," " My Saviour." There might have been 
some such unfortunate hearer in the church in 

Corinth who could not find the peace that his 
2 



i8 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 

friends found through beheving in Jesus. The 
heavens still seemed dark and empty above his 
head; his prayers brought no answer; he felt him- 
self as one rejected, as if he had committed the 
unpardonable sin. What sort of advice do you 
think Paul would have offered to such a man ? 
For my part, I doubt whether he would have 
offered him any advice at all in words; but I 
think he would have enlisted the man in some 
practical service for some neighbor of his, some 
weaker brother who needed his helping hand. 
So it would have gone on until the poor doubter 
had caught enough spiritual enthusiasm, and be- 
come enough concerned about this weak brother, 
to lose sight of his own selfish spiritual troubles ; 
and then some day he would learn that the grace 
of God which he had been vainly seeking had 
now found him. 

Now he believes. " The reason why I care for 
that weak brother," the man says to himself, " is 
because Christ cared enough for him to die for 
him. Yes, and because He cared enough for me 
to die for me." For you notice that was the way 
the conviction grew with the apostle himself 
The Christ who cared for the weak brother cared 
also for Paul. This man who had learned to care 
so much for each of his converts, and had learned 



THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 19 



to think of the weakest of them as one for whom 
Christ died, — it is he who has given us in his 
Epistle to the Galatians that other wonderful con- 
fession of faith : " I live by the faith of the Son of 
God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me." 
There is personal assurance for you. No wonder 
the same man could say afterwards, in the imme- 
diate prospect of martyrdom, " I know whom I 
have beheved." 

But we have been trying to trace the practical 
steps by which he had reached that assurance. 
All the way through he had been doing the will, 
and so had come to know. It was while he him- 
self was devoting his life to caring for men that 
he learned so much about God's care for them 
and for him. 

Do you wish to get safely over that impassable 
gulf? Do you wish to get your feet planted firm 
on the blessed certainty on the other side ? Do 
you long to know that God cares for you, — that 
Christ cared for you enough to die for you ? 
Then do you go and find your weak brother and 
care for him. " He that doeth shall know." 



II 

A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 



II 



A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 

" And the children of Joseph spake unto Joshua, saying, Why 
hast thou given me but one lot and one portion to inherit, seeing 
I am a great people." — JoSHUA xvii. 14. 

It is the language of complaint against the 
orderings of divine providence ; these children 
of Joseph, the two tribes of Ephraim and Ma- 
nasseh, had grown very great among the tribes 
of Israel, and they complained that they had not 
been given a proportionately great lot of land. 
They brought their complaint to Joshua, and ex- 
pected him quickly to attend to it, seeing that he 
himself was of the tribe of Ephraim. 

We may take these discontented tribesmen as 
a type of the discontented of every age who have 
been ready to complain that the lot assigned 
them has not been equal to their abihty or their 
desert. Such complainers have been very com- 
mon. 

You will see the children in the nursery at the 
cutting of the cake, each watching jealously, and 
loud in his complaints if brother seems to get a 

23 



24 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



crumb too much in his portion, and he himself a 
crumb too Httle. The world is full of people 
who are children grown a little larger, without 
leaving their childish quarrels and jealousies be- 
hind them. Our text sets before us a striking 
example of that kind of fretful and jealous com- 
plaining. 

Now let me say at the outset that, under some 
circumstances, this complaint, as addressed to the 
man Joshua, might have been just ; if the whole 
land had been conquered, so that there was no 
more to be had, and now in the division one 
tribe with only a few thousand people in it were 
given as large a portion as another tribe with 
hundreds of thousands of people in it — that were 
a wrong that ought to be righted. 

There has often been a great deal of that kind 
of injustice in the human distribution of the va- 
rious opportunities of life. To correct it has been 
the great aim of every true reformer. We have 
all learned, in theory at least, to set our faces 
against monopoly in land, or any other kind of 
monopoly. Wherever there is only so much of 
any valuable commodity to be had, and some one 
favored individual or family or tribe has got the 
whole of it, or an undue share of it, we all join 
in the complaint and the demand for redress ; as 



A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 25 



it was in France, for example, or indeed in any 
country of Europe, before the great Revolution ; 
when certain favored classes owned nearly all 
the land there was, while the mass of the people 
lived by sufferance in a country which in no 
sense belonged to them ; here a crowded village 
of peasants nearly starving, and over there a sin- 
gle noble family using its vast estates for pre- 
serving game. It may not always be easy to say 
who is to blame for such an outrage, or just how 
to correct it ; but if we can in any way get the 
ear of Joshua we shall tell him that such a dis- 
tribution of the world's opportunities is an awful 
wrong, and must somehow be set right. 

There is no reason to suppose that we have 
got all these wrongs righted yet, or ever shall 
till the Millennium. We are still a long distance 
from our goal. But the goal is to offer to every 
child ever born into this world an equal chance 
with every other to make the most of that one 
life he has to live here. An equal chance, I say ; 
whether or not the child improves it will be for 
him to determine ; but we hold ourselves ready 
to hear the complaints of those who have not had 
that equal chance. So I would say with all pos- 
sible emphasis, that under some conditions such 
a complaint as these men of Ephraim brought to 



26 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



Joshua might have been entirely just, and worthy 
of the most careful consideration. 
. But in fact the conditions were very different 
from that ; the land had not all been conquered 
and occupied; "there remaineth yet very much 
land to be possessed " ; the opportunities for each 
tribe were still practically unlimited; the only 
question was, would they improve them? And 
here was this tribe of Ephraim complaining that 
though it was so great and strong, it had a very 
small inheritance. But Joshua stopped them just 
there ; the blunt old soldier has very little patience 
with that complaint. He answers them out of 
their own mouth. " If you be a great people," 
he says, " then get you up to the wood-country, 
and cut out a place for yourself ; if your Mount 
Ephraim is too narrow for you, find a broader 
territory." They seemed to think that because 
they were so big a tribe, some one else ought to 
conquer and clear a great territory for them ; 
but Joshua answers : " The land is open ; if you 
are a big tribe truly, go out and conquer and 
clear that large inheritance for yourself" 

Now Joshua stood to the various tribes as a 
representative of divine Providence. Many of the 
complaints that men bring against Providence 
ought to be answered as this bluff old soldier 



A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 27 



answered his fellow-tribesmen. For in substance 
the complaint is that we deserve a better portion 
than we have received ; the answer is that, if we 
really deserve it, we must go and get it ; there is 
nothing to hinder; the land is open; there is 
room enough yet. However it may be in other 
countries, here in America, thank God, the land 
is still open; there is room and to spare for all 
the tribes ; and if these querulous men of Ephraim 
are really speaking the truth, and if they are 
really worthy of a larger inheritance, there is 
nothing in the world to prevent their getting it. 

I do not say that all the good things of life are 
equitably distributed among us ; far from it ; for I 
think some people have a great deal more than 
they deserve, and a great deal more than is good 
for them. Our national wealth has been increas- 
ing at such a portentous rate of speed that it yields 
a large overflow which no one can be said fairly 
to have earned ; and the way this overflow is dis- 
tributed among the people perplexes our sense 
of justice not a little ; I do not think the worthiest 
tribe always gets the biggest share of that surplus, 
that unearned increment. 

But that has nothing to do with the question 
before us this morning. If some men get more 
than they deserve, more than they have earned, 



28 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



we may leave it for them to settle that with 
Providence as best they may. If some of the 
tribes should feel impelled to come back to Joshua 
with the title deed of a portion of their allotment, 
saying, " It is too much for us ; we do not deserve 
it all ; we cannot use it all ; take some of it back," 
we can leave Joshua and that tribe to settle it 
together. To-day we are interested in a tribe that 
brought the opposite complaint, that it had re- 
ceived too little. And such are the common com- 
plaints even in this land of promise, but I think it 
is still possible for Joshua to reply to such a com- 
plaint generally : " If you say that your portion is 
too little for your abilities, then go and win more." 

You see the trouble with the people of Ephraim 
was that they expected to profit by a kind of 
favoritism. Joshua was their own fellow-tribes- 
man, and they expected him to give them land 
that some other tribe had already conquered and 
cleared. They thought so big and strong a tribe 
as theirs ought to be able to get all the land they 
wanted without fighting and working for it ; that 
some favor ought to be shown them because of 
their size. But Joshua answered, " If you really are 
big and strong, that is the very reason why you do 
not need any favor or partiality ; use your strength 
like men, go and get your own inheritance." 



A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 29 



It is much as if some boy were beginning to 
work in his father's business establishment, and 
says to his father : " Of course you will give me 
an easier place than the other clerks, and better 
pay, because I am your son." But the father, 
happening to be a man of some discretion, answers : 
" If you are a true son of mine, you will not be 
needing favors. The advantages- that you have 
been enjoying ever since you were born in our 
home ought to enable you to give favors rather 
than ask them. If you feel yourself capable of 
filling a higher position and earning more pay than 
your fellow-clerks, go up and win the position ; 
the way is open." Not all earthly fathers are wise 
enough to make that response to their children ; 
our feelings often run away with our judgment; 
but that is the response which the heavenly 
Father through His providence makes to His 
children when they come with such complaints. 
There is no respect of persons with Him, and the 
providential answer to each complaint is : " If you 
are, as you say, big enough for a bigger position, 
go and get it." Listen once more to old Joshua's 
words ; he stood there on this occasion, I think, 
as a true prophet, a spokesman for God ; " If 
thou be a great people, then get thee up to the 
wood-country ; and if it be too narrow for thee. 



30 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



then cut down for thyself there in the land of the 
Perizzites and of the giants." 

That is the way the larger inheritances are 
really won. Oh ! it would be a good thing for 
many of us in our moods of idle complaining if 
we could study a little biography ; if we could come 
to understand by what hard effort and fighting 
some of our neighbors have won their inheritance, 
some of those perhaps whom we were most dis- 
posed to envy as if they were petted children of 
fortune on whom her favors had been showered ; 
if we could know by what terribly hard work they 
had first proved their fitness to receive them. 

Joshua's answer did not suit the men of Ephraim 
at all. They drew back in dismay. " The hill is 
too small for us," they kept on saying, " and the 
broad plain about it is full of Canaanites, and they 
have chariots of iron." That was not what they 
wanted at all ; where was the advantage of being 
a big and popular tribe, with their own tribesman 
for judge, if they must go and carve out a future 
for themselves by hard working and fighting, like 
any other family of people ? But Joshua is firm : 
that is just what they will have to do. " If you 
want more room, the mountain is yours," he 
says, "And you must cut down the forests and 
make more room for yourselves ; and if that is not 



A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 31 



enough, spread as far as you will over the plain, 
and drive out the enemies that are there, terrible 
iron chariots and all ; for ye are a great people 
and strong ; there is your inheritance." 

It is a good word for any of us who are looking 
forward over the future with its opportunities. 
Not many of us are altogether satisfied with the 
past allotment. The mountain so far opened has 
been too narrow. We have a notion that we were 
made for something a little larger. The young 
men especially — and you know these children of 
Joseph stood for the young, for Joseph was next 
to the youngest of all the sons of Jacob. Always 
the young men, young merchants, lawyers, doc- 
tors, authors, whatever they are, are looking for 
more room. They hope that the coming year 
will furnish more room. And that is well. Only 
how do you propose to get it ? Are you coming 
up in the spirit of greedy place-hunters : expecting 
some one else to win and clear an inheritance for 
you, to put your neighbor out, and to put you in ? 
If so, I think each new year's providences will 
silence your complaint with some such calm re- 
sponse as Joshua gave to his tribe when he said : 
" If you are big enough, and strong enough, to 
deserve a larger inheritance, then you must be big 
and strong enough to go and win it." 



32 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



But I am impatient to broaden the scope of 
our subject, so as to make it more worthy of the 
place where we are met together. For we must 
broaden it a good deal to make it fit well with 
the breadth of the gospel of Jesus. The kinds of 
opportunity we have been speaking of, however 
valuable in their place, are not the kind that Jesus 
encouraged His disciples to seek most earnestly, 
and neither did He promise that they would 
always find them. Furthermore, His gospel is 
not preached only to the young, or to the big and 
strong tribes, like Ephraim and Judah in their 
central positions of influence, but it offers its mes- 
sage with peculiar urgency and tenderness to the 
smaller and less favored people, Hke little Dan, or 
dwindling Simeon and Reuben ; or, far away in 
the north, Zebulon and NephthaHm. You re- 
member that beautiful prophecy which Matthew 
puts at the very beginning of his account of our 
Lord's ministry : " The land of Zebulon, and the 
land of NephthaHm, . . . Galilee of the Gentiles ; 
the people which sat in darkness saw great light ; 
and to them which sat in the region and shadow of 
death light is sprung up." I have spoken of the 
opportunities that the future may open before big, 
strong Ephraim, boasting in the vigor of his youth. 
What opportunities are there for any who have 



A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 33 



seemed to themselves small, enfeebled, and dis- 
couraged, and sitting in the region and shadow of 
death ? Why, the very best opportunities of all, 
perhaps, if only they are willing to seize them and 
use them. 

Do you remember the impatient murmur of 
our great Puritan poet when first his blindness 
came upon him, " ere half his days in this dark 
world and wide " ? A man who in his youth had 
been so brave and resolute in using to the utmost 
every talent his Creator had lodged with him, 
now his soul is more bent than ever to serve his 
Maker and present a true account; but this 
dreadful blindness stops him ; and he cries, " Doth 
God exact day labor, light denied?" But the 
answer is, 

" Who best bear his mild yoke, they serve him be&t." 

and, 

" They also serve who only stand and wait," 

Do you remember that other earlier servant, 
greater than Milton, but with a Hke impetuous 
spirit, who had prayed God again and again to 
take from him that thorn in the flesh which weak- 
ened and humbled him and hindered his activity 
at the very time when his soul was most bent 
to make every talent serve his Maker; and the 

3 



34 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



answer came, My grace is sufficient for thee : 
for My strength is made perfect in weakness " ? 

Add those messages, if you will, from Milton 
and from Paul, to the message that we have been 
studying from honest old Joshua : so we may gain 
some faint conception of the rich abundance of 
opportunity that God is really opening before every 
one of us every day of our lives to render to Him 
some honorable day's service. So long as we felt 
young and strong there was opportunity to serve 
Him by using that strength in manfully over- 
coming difficulties, cutting down the forests, and 
driving out the enemies with their chariots of iron. 
But when disappointments come, or sickness, or 
the infirmities of age, there is our opportunity to 
render service to God, — and it may be the most 
acceptable service of all, — in bearing this trial 
with resolute good cheer. So every day and 
every year are bringing to ever}^ one opportunity 
for the largest, best, most honorable and most 
acceptable service he has it in him to render. 

Oh ! but it is hard work — hard work to win 
and clear that inheritance — always hard work ; 
hard to do things efficiently; harder still to en- 
dure cheerfully and to wait patiently. 

At first we were not looking for such hard 
work. We were hke those men of Ephraim, 



A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 



35 



hoping to come into our inheritance by some 
easier course; we were to be treated as favored 
children. A lot that some other had taken and 
cleared was to be handed over to us all ready 
for our enjoyment. We expected to inherit our 

e 

father's triumphant faith in God, his firm assur- 
ance of the reality of things unseen, his bright 
hope of heaven, his power of prayer, as easily 
as we expected to inherit his dollars or his acres. 
But some day when we wake up to a sense of 
the fact that it is not so, that we have not inher- 
ited these things, we are surprised and almost 
indip"nant. Instead of those broad territories of 
Christian faith on which we have been counting, 
we find ourselves cramped in a position that 
hardly gives us room for the soles of our feet — 
when the time of stress comes, and our easily 
inherited faith is put to the test and crumbles 
away from us ; when we begin to need most 
the help of prayer, and find that we never have 
learned to pray ; when we need most a Saviour 
from the awful assault of temptation, and find we 
have made no personal acquaintance with any; 
when we most sorely need the promises of the 
Holy Book, and find we never have made them 
ours, and that we do not know even where to 
look for them between the covers. 



36 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



Oh ! it is very hard ; we had flattered ourselves 
that the entire highway reaching from the cradle 
to the grave, and to the heavenly home beyond 
it, belonged to us, bestowed upon us by some 
divine favoritism, because of the happy circum- 
stances of our birth in Christian homes ; and now 
under this storm of doubt and trouble it all has 
disappeared. Everything behind us and before us 
and above us is gone. We are sure of nothing 
but this present moment, this little instant of time 
on which we stand. Why, it seems to us that no 
benighted heathen in Africa is left more com- 
pletely without God and without hope than we 
disinherited children of the faith. 

That is a common experience, I believe, and 
comes sooner or later to many who have been 
reared in Christian homes, and it seems very hard 
to us. But when we begin to speak or to think 
our complaints over such treatment, the question 
comes back out of the silence : " Of what are you 
complaining? What better have you deserved? 
If there is enough character in you to deserve a 
more spacious faith, there must be enough to go 
out and win it." But to win a faith in God will 
mean hard working sometimes, and hard fighting 
sometimes, and hard waiting and much patient 
enduring. That is the way other men have 



A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 37 



learned — it is the way your own father learned 
to believe and pray. And every year will give 
you plentiful opportunities — every day of every 
year is full of them— for driving back these cruel, 
insolent doubts, and winning a faith that shall be 
yours to keep forever. 

Oh, let us have done with this idle complaining 
against God. The Judge of all the earth does 
right — be sure of it — in distributing gifts, both 
temporal and spiritual. When the time comes 
that we can look back and see the whole course 
of events by which the land has been portioned 
out among the different tribes, we shall see that 
no one of them has anything to complain about ; 
no tribe has received from God a smaller portion 
than it had fairly earned. 

No; no tribe, no man, has received from God 
a smaller portion than he has fairly earned. 
Rather, we are continually receiving from God 
larger portions than we have fairly earned. God 
is just to all ; He never ceases to be just, but He 
is also wonderfully generous and gracious. 
Every day of our lives — this day — what a mul- 
titude of forfeited opportunities He renews to us ! 
How He turns even our failures, cowardices, and 
sins, into new and unexpected offers of inherit- 
ance! 



38 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



We could not understand this at first ; we did 
not know it so long as we were boasting and 
complaining. The answer that came to us then 
was like Joshua's stern answer to the men of 
Ephraim, " If you say you deserve a larger in- 
heritance, then go and win it. You shall be given 
all you earn." But the moment we drop that 
foolish, fretful, boastful pride, and begin to con- 
fess our own fault and weakness ; and to ask God 
of His mercy to help us, though we do not de- 
serve His help ; like the poor boy in the parable 
who came back from his folly, cr^'ing, " Father I 
have sinned, . . . and am no more worthy to be 
called thy son " ; then our answer does not come 
to us through such a one as Joshua. The stern 
old soldier must step aside ; for God begins to 
speak to us through the lips of His well-beloved 
Son, Jesus, who came to bless the unworthy. 
In our confessed weakness He begins to make 
His strength perfect; in our confessed sin. He 
begins to make His grace sufficient ; in our pov- 
erty. He grants us some share of His eternal in- 
heritance. Then He will send us out to go in our 
turn on like errands of helpfulness. When we 
have learned from Jesus, there will be no time 
left to worry that so httle has been done for us ; 
for we shall always be wondering how we can 



A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 



do more for some one else. When we have 
learned from Jesus, it will seem to us that the 
choicest opportunity of all is that of doing a 
kindness or a service for some neighbor. 

I do not know just how much the men of 
Ephraim learned from Joshua's counsel — enough, 
one would hope, to shame them out of their idle 
complaining. But if instead of Joshua, our Cap- 
tain, Jesus, had stood among them. He would 
have made those strong Ephraimites from that 
time on a sort of champions among all the tribes. 
Their battle-cry would have been, " We that are 
strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, 
and not to please ourselves." Wherever they 
could learn of any other weaker tribe that fal- 
tered under the assault of its enemies, any tribe 
that began to be enfeebled by age, or disheart- 
ened by failure, or in any way disinherited, — for 
the converted Ephraimites that would be the 
dearest opportunity of all, — not a chance to get 
more land for themselves, but a chance to do 
more service for their brethren. 



Ill 

THE MONOTONY OF SIN 



Ill 



THE MONOTONY OF SIN 

** And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord : 
he departed not from all the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, 
who made Israel to sin." — II. Kings 14 : 24. 

Some years ago the Sunday-school lessons in 
the International Course were appointed for several 
months from the historical books of the Old Testa- 
ment. They included the history of the Northern 
Kingdom of Israel ; and I well remember the gen- 
eral agreement among scholars and teachers that 
it was not an interesting series of lessons. While 
the study lasted there was a good deal of com- 
plaint that the series had not been wisely selected. 

But when we reached the end and looked 
back over the whole period, there was at least 
one instructive fact to carry away, namely, that 
wickedness is apt to be a monotonous, tiresome 
thing. We had been studying the lives of a series 
of bad men ; and when we had learned about one 
of them, it appeared that we had learned nearly 
all there was to tell worth telling about all of 
them. It was nearly the same lesson, Sunday 
after Sunday, only with a different name for the 

43 



44 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



king. It happened that the first of these northern 
sovereigns was named Jeroboam, son of Nebat : 
and he set the fashion of sinning against God by- 
worshiping golden calves. And whenever one 
more king died and the historian was writing a 
record of his life, the regular thing to say was : 
" He departed not from all the sins of Jeroboam 
the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin." 

We grew tired studying that same thing over 
every Sunday for six months : but just think how 
tiresome it must have been for the people of the 
kingdom of Israel to go on living that same thing 
over and over for two hundred and fifty years. 
Intolerable monotony ! Really it seemed that the 
whole nation might have given a sigh of relief 
when at last the Assyrians came up and con- 
quered them and took them off into captivity in a 
strange land, where they might hear no more of 
" Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to 
sin." 

That may be an instructive chapter of history, 
I think, for the very reason that it is not at all an 
interesting chapter, but so desperately monot- 
onous. For the lesson is that when a king, or a 
people, starts out to be bad, before they are 
through, they will find it intolerably tiresome and 
uninteresting and slow. 



THE MONOTONY OF SIN 



45 



Of course, that has not been the common idea 
about sin — not at all. Men think that goodness 
is the uninteresting and old-fashioned affair, and 
that sin is the novelty, entertaining, vivacious, 
venturesome, anything but slow. We call a bad 
man fast. Men are tempted to do wrong for the 
sake of the novelty, pleasure, change, and exhil- 
aration of spirit, that it promises them. 

Now if that promise is a lie, it will be well to 
know it ; and it is a lie. These sinners often cul- 
tivate the manner of being audacious, venture- 
some, and brilliant ; but, after all, how little orig- 
inality has appeared among them within the last 
six thousand years ? 

You read the pages of history, and as far back 
as you can go you will find our latest styles 
of wickedness already old-fashioned — cruelty, 
avarice, unprincipled ambition, licentiousness, 
drunkenness. The archaeologists have been shed- 
ding much light on these subjects within the last 
few years, and, judging from what they tell us, if 
you should take one of old Pharaoh's courtiers 
through the streets of New York some night, 
trying to show him modern life in its most start- 
ling and novel varieties, you would soon catch 
him yawning. **We had all that in Egypt," he 
would say, " before the pyramids were built. You 



46 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



have nothing new in what you call New York." 
Or if it were one of Nebuchadnezzar's nobles he 
would rub his eyes sleepily and say : " Yes ; but, 
you know, we did these same things rather better 
in the good old days in Babylon," Or if you 
should take a Roman senator of the days of the 
Empire to some luxurious scene of debauchery, 
he would complain that it all seemed rather tame 
and insipid compared with the spreads that Apicius 
used to give in Rome before he committed suicide 
— poor fellow. " Suicide ! What in the world did 
he commit suicide for ? " " Oh, he got tired to 
death of it all after a while." 

So one of the revelers of the old French kingdom 
would be reminded of his own Paris ; and one of 
George the Fourth's boon companions, of London 
and Brighton. Not a man of them all would 
admit that the fast society of New York had dis- 
covered any really novel way of going to perdi- 
tion. Always some old Jeroboam or other, whose 
monument crumbled into dust a thousand years 
ago, had set the fashion for each of these latest 
novelties in wickedness. 

There are novelties in our modern world ; but 
to discover them you will need some other guide 
than these leaders in the ways of sin — the useful 
inventions of our day, for instance: the steamship, 



THE MONOTONY OF SIN 



47 



the railway, the printing press. " There is some- 
thing new indeed," our resurrected ancient would 
say. " We had some ancient arts of our own : 
simple contrivances that looked in this direction ; 
prophecies, of which this is the nobler fulfillment ; 
but nothing up to this. Tell me the names of the 
men who introduced these refreshing and rejuve- 
nating novelties to the aged world." 

Or the freedom of our day, and the compara- 
tive equality ; no slaves at one end of the social 
chain, no irresponsible despots at the other ; the 
law of the land as a power ruling over all ; the 
respect shown for honest labor ; the reverence for 
woman ; the pubHc peace and security ; the safety 
with which a man may travel round the world un- 
armed and unharmed. Not that we have attained 
perfection along any of these lines ; but, as com- 
pared with what used to be, we have here some- 
thing that might bring an expression of lively 
interest back into the face even of an Egyptian 
mummy if you could once set his heart beating 
again and get the breath of life back into him. 

But then suppose, leading your visitor from the 
past a little further, you could show him an or- 
phanage, or a hospital, or some such charity. I 
can see his stare of amazement. Nothing like 
that in Egypt or Babylon ; nothing just Hke that 



48 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



even in Rome. " That," he says, *' is a stranger 
novelty than the steamship, for we had a kind of 
ships ; or the electric light, for we had a kind of 
lamps. But a home for helpless, destitute chil- 
dren ! We had nothing like that. We left them 
on the hill to starve ; or bred them up to be sold 
as slaves, or trained for the legions. This is a 
new idea. Who does such a thing as this ? Why 
does he do it?" I fear he might find people here 
in Christian America who could not intelligently 
answer either of these questions ; but I should like 
to watch the eager interest with which a quick- 
witted ancient, like Elijah, or Plato, or Seneca, 
would ask those questions about our modern 
Christian charities. 

Well, from such tours of discovery you might 
bring your visitor back with you to a place like 
this — some Christian church. I doubt whether 
you could keep him awake through the sermon ; 
but, if he were an ancient worthy of the honor of 
coming back to earth, I should like to watch his 
face through the reading from this book of such a 
story as the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. " Why, 
yes," he might say ; " that sounds familiar. I 
have seen plenty of unfortunate creatures put to 
death on the cross. We thought nothing of that." 
But when he learned that after all these ages the 



THE MONOTONY OF SIN 



49 



nations of earth are still drawing inspiration for 
all these works that seemed to him newest and 
most interesting from the life and death of that 
Man who was crucified long ago outside the walls 
of Jerusalem — " There is something to study into," 
he would say. " It is new indeed that a shameful 
cross could be transformed into so glorious an 
emblem of power." And I can see the man who 
had turned in weary disgust from all the costliest 
wickednesses and luxuries of our modern world 
because he and his neighbors had been sated with 
the like long ages ago — I can see him taking his 
seat with attentive interest at the feet of any plain 
man, or woman, or child, who could tell him any 
part of the new secret of Christian love and devo- 
tion. 

Ah, I wish we could learn the truth of it with- 
out waiting two or three thousand years to have 
our eyes opened, that some earnest purpose — 
some real devotion, such as Jesus Christ taught to 
men, is what brings zest and life and variety and 
refreshing progress into this weary old world : it 
is the salt of the earth. 

Wickedness in its various forms has promised 
all this to men, and has lied. Sin, — I suppose it 
began some time by some one's perverse invention ; 
it was new then ; but so long ago as we know any- 
4 



50 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 

thing about the world sin has been always old- 
fashioned, stale, weary, flat, unprofitable. One 
Jeroboam will set the style for a hundred thou- 
sand senseless, servile imitators ; and Jeroboam 
himself copied some Aaron or other sinner a little 
further back. Wide is the gate and broad is the 
road that leadeth to destruction, and many there 
be which go in thereat ; and they all fall into the 
same monotonous gait before they have gone far. 

Use your own eyes and see if this is not true. 
Watch a company of gamblers ; the same monoto- 
nous throwing the dice, or shuffling the cards, 
hour after hour, all night, every night if the infatu- 
ation has thoroughly enslaved them. A friend of 
mine chanced to pass the night in Leadville in its 
so-called prosperous days ; and in the evening, 
walking about to see the town, stepped into one of 
its gambling establishments. After watching the 
men for a little while he went back to his lodging 
place and tried to sleep. Not succeeding well, he 
rose the next morning at the first break of day 
and walked out into the street again. He soon 
found himself in front of the same gambling estab- 
lishment, and, listening, could hear behind the 
door the click of the game. He pushed open the 
door and found everything going on much as he 
had left it the evening before. " Has not the 



THE MONOTONY OF SIN 



51 



game stopped yet?" he asked an attendant. "The 
game never stops," was the answer. My friend 
got such an impression as he never had received 
before of the " worm that dieth not, and the fire 
that is not quenched." " The game never stops." 

You talk of the intolerable sameness of some 
manual trades, where a poor artisan is kept at 
his bench for hours — close air, cramped position, 
wearisome monotony of motions. But few artisans 
have more to complain of in this particular than a 
thoroughgoing gambler — only he does not know 
enough to complain. He is chained to the longest 
hours, often the closest air, the most intolerably 
monotonous succession of motions, and he cannot 
get out of that groove. Give him a million dollars 
to-morrow, and ask him what he will do with it : 
" Go on gambling for larger stakes." The game 
never stops. So far as variety goes, you might 
as well spend your life putting points on pins. 

Or take the sin of profanity. Why, a parrot 
can learn to swear as well as a man. I am told 
it is an accomplishment which those grotesque 
birds are specially apt to pick up — and no wonder : 
there are no other forms of human speech which 
are repeated with such wearisome sameness of 
reiteration. If you want to be an original con- 
versationalist, you might better make up your 



52 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



mind never to speak at all than learn to swear. 
Half a dozen phrases to apply to all possible 
events and conditions ! It is really pitiful to see 
the noble faculty of human speech shrunken to 
such narrow dimensions, I have seen a dog that 
could express more sentiment and more intelligent 
judgment by the wagging of his tail than some 
men can express by a half day's conversation — 
the same oaths over and over and over. 

Yet boys just out of the nursery are tempted 
to swear because they think it is startling, ven- 
turesome, original, spicy. Every oath they can 
learn was stale a thousand years before they were 
born. So far as originality goes, I would rather 
be a street peddler who tramps about the town 
hawking his one commodity with a single cry; 
for at least he has some rational object in it; 
and when the day is done he can count up his 
gains and spend the evening talking of something 
else. The inveterate swearer's day never is done, 
and he has no evening when he can talk of any- 
thing else. 

Have you studied the air of those people who 
have really made it their business to find their 
pleasure in dissipation, searching out for them- 
selves the most startling and daring forms of 
selfish entertainment ? Their faces grow jaded so 



THE MONOTONY OF SIN 



53 



quickly ; they are so soon tired of life ; it takes so 
short a time to complete the whole circuit of 
novelties for them. I overheard a man of this 
type, who apparently was entertaining a party of 
friends with accounts of what he proposed to do 
the coming summer. He kept them laughing 
heartily until he broke off with the words, " Unless 
they put me in Greenwood first, and the sooner 
they do that the better." Then he added : " Any 
man of my age would say the same thing. You 
young fellows, twenty-five years old, think it is 
all very fine, but a man of my age knows. The 
sooner they put me in Greenwood the better." 

Ah, but there are people in this world, thank 
God, to whom the experiences of life have not 
been teaching that melancholy lesson — those who 
have let God lead them on in courses of devoted 
service. Every honest workman who fulfills his 
daily task with a godly purpose toward his family ; 
every bright-minded scholar, inventor, or discov- 
erer, who has opened op new regions of the uni- 
verse for the good of his race ; every reformer 
who has set his eye on some distant height of 
liberty or righteousness, to which he would lead 
the people — such men may often have been ex- 
hausted and sometimes discouraged, but at least 
their faces are kept free from those ugliest lines 



54 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



of disgust and weariness of life. Life has stayed 
interesting to them ; its successes, and its failures 
also, are at least interesting. They mark some- 
thing new ; steps along the Hne of progress into 
new fields. If the aim is really high and worthy, 
such a man, so long as he lives, finds life grow- 
ing always more interesting. The future has 
always meant more to him than the past. He 
holds his face forward like a prophet. Death 
itself cannot suppress in his breast this strong 
interest and hope for what is beyond. It is 
through such men, with their confident expecta- 
tions, that the revelation of eternal life has been 
confirmed to our race. 

This is a lesson that all the ages have been 
teaching — that service makes life fresh and inter- 
esting. But the real secret of it, the secret of 
service itself, is love. Jesus Christ, who gave His 
life for men, first clearly taught the world that 
lesson. It is love Hke His own, love caught from 
His own. 

One would Hke to persuade everybody to be a 
good Christian, partly for the reason that it would 
make the world so fresh and entertaining to every- 
body. Really, if there were no other reason, it 
would be well worth while for some people to 
begin to follow Jesus Christ for the novelty of it. 



THE MONOTONY OF SIN 



55 



Such a refreshing change for a man who has 
always lived to please himself until he is tired 
to death, to begin to think of some one else, and 
to live for some one else. You remember the 
beginning of Christ's miracles, which He did in 
Cana of Galilee — shall we call it a miracle or 
parable ? — when He made the water wine. When 
the ruler of the feast tasted this most delightful 
beverage, not knowing whence it came, he said 
to the bridegroom : " Every man at the begin- 
ning doth set forth good wine ; and when men 
have well drunk, then that which is worse : but 
thou hast kept the good wine until now." The 
speaker knew all about the ways of common wine- 
drinking: its brilliant promise of pleasure, its 
speedy degeneracy : the best first, and when men 
have well drunk, then worse and worse and 
worse. One need not wish a more convincing 
temperance argument than has come down from 
the lips of that ancient toastmaster of Cana, that 
expert in the bright promise and miserable per- 
formance of the wine-cup toward its deluded 
votaries. " But thou," he said, noting this one 
strange exception, and knowing not that Jesus 
was the cause of it, " Thou hast kept the good 
wine until now," till the end of the feast. 

So it was ; but even after a lifetime of drinking 



56 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



from that cup which Jesus holds out to His friends, 
I suppose no one could be quite accustomed to 
its delightful contrast with the intoxications of 
earthly pleasure. For here each succeeding ex- 
perience of the pleasure comes " a sweet and glad 
surprise"; it is always something new. A man 
who has once learned from Jesus his Saviour to 
love and serve devotedly could live the longest 
life through happily, and at the end come back to 
his divine Friend, saying : " Thou hast kept the 
good wine until now." And I suppose as the 
seasons of eternity roll round still he could say : 
" Thou hast kept the good wine until now." 

Which kind of life shall we choose ? Let me 
leave with you two contrasted pictures. One is 
from the pen of the great English satirist who 
once wrote this description of the employments 
of Vanity Fair : " Pursuing what mean ends ; 
grasping and scrambling frantically for what petty 
prizes ; ambitious for what shabby recompenses ; 
trampling from life's beginning to its close through 
what scenes of stale dissipations and faded pleas- 
ures " ; — that is, as our text puts it, forever and 
ever repeating over and over the identical sin of 
some old Jeroboam son of Nebat, who long ago 
first made the people to sin. That is the one pic- 
ture, the one leader. 



THE MONOTONY OF SIN 



57 



But the other leader, the other picture, is this : 
" Thou, Lord Jesus, hast kept the good wine until 
now." Which leader do we choose to follow 
through the coming years ? 



IV 



THE THREE TAVERNS: A MIS- 
SIONARY SERMON 



IV 



THE THREE TAVERNS: A MISSIONARY SERMON 

" And from thence, when the brethren heard of us, they came 
to meet us as far as Appii forum, and The three taverns : whom 
when Paul saw, he thanked God, and took courage." — Acts 
xxviii. 15. 

On the Mount of Transfiguration Peter saw his 
Lord glorified, and he felt it good to be there, 
and proposed to make three tabernacles and stay 
there. It was not a wise proposal ; the evan- 
gelist's comment on it is that Peter knew not 
what he spake." Dr. Babcock's comment on the 
same verse is beautiful : " If the mercies of God 
have blessedly beset us, let us not build three tab- 
ernacles that we may abide ; but rather, like Paul, 
call the places where our mercies meet us Three 
Taverns, then push on, thank God, and take cour- 
age. Every attainment is to be a footing for new 
attempts, and every goal a point of departure," 
A beautiful thought to connect with this old 
resting place on the Appian Road. It was only 
a resting place, not a place where any traveler 
would think of building his permanent home. It 

61 



62 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



was a place to catch your breath for a moment 
or two, and get a Httle food, and bait your horse, 
and then with revived courage push on toward 
Rome. 

You know for Paul these three taverns stood 
near the end of a very long journey, for all his 
life he had been moving toward Rome. By birth 
he was a Roman citizen ; and yet his eyes had 
never seen the great city of his citizenship; but 
now for many years he had felt himself drawn 
toward it by an attraction that grew stronger 
and stronger, till it was beyond resisting. This 
was not the idle curiosity of a tourist or an 
antiquarian ; it was not that he longed to see the 
old Forum and the Temple of Jupiter and the 
splendid palaces of the Caesars. Not that; but 
Rome had now become the center of the world, 
the heart from which throbbed forth the vital cur- 
rents of the world's civilization ; for this was the 
period when that third great wall encompassed 
the city ; not the first wall of Romulus, with its 
Hmited inclosure around the Palatine Hill ; not 
the second of Servius Tullius, a little larger, but 
barely inclosing the Seven Hills. In Paul's day 
the wall of Rome followed that immense circuit 
at the very boundaries of civilization, up in Britain, 
and through the German forests, and far eastward 



THE THREE TAVERNS 



63 



into Asia, and southward into Africa, wherever 
the Roman legions were beating back the barba- 
rians. That was the wall. The center, the heart 
of that magnificent world-empire, was still the 
ancient city on the banks of the Tiber. It was 
almost beyond the powers of the human mind to 
conceive such a stretch of dominion as Rome had 
now acquired. The world had known nothing 
like it before ; the greatest of earlier empires, 
Egypt, Babylon, Macedonia, only ranked now as 
subordinate provinces of Rome. The great Julius, 
and each of his successors after him, did " bestride 
the narrow world like a Colossus " ; but generally 
the stride was too much for the man. His head 
was crazed by such an elevation. A strange 
streak of madness became the hereditary curse 
of the imperial family. Tiberius, Caligula, Nero — 
they all were maniacs, and not many of the line 
were altogether sane. No family of men had 
yet been developed on the planet whose faculties 
would be commensurate with this immense expan- 
sion of power. Indeed, since the death of the great 
Augustus I am not sure that a single man had 
appeared on earth with thoughts and ambitions 
large enough to match the power of the Caesars, 
except one ; and that one was this impatient trav- 
eler who now caught his breath for a little while 



64 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



at the Three Taverns before he started on for the 
last stage of his journey toward Rome. God had 
raised up one man at last and made him big 
enough to discern and use these matchless oppor- 
tunities of the Roman Empire. 

We have always recognized the hand of divine 
providence in the growth of Rome's power as 
preparatory to the spread of Christianity. As in 
Palestine God had been deaHng with His own 
chosen people of Israel through the ages, reveal- 
ing His will through their prophets till at last 
the Christ was born among them ; so in Italy He 
had been raising up another people, and making 
them strong to fight and wise to organize and 
skillful to build, that they might break down the 
narrow national boundaries of antiquity, and bind 
the many nations together by bonds of a common 
law and common language; building out also 
every way those grand roads on which Christ's 
missionaries might march swiftly on their errands 
of salvation ; I say we have always recognized 
this providential purpose in the growth of Rome's 
political power. But within the last few years 
the scholars have been making clearer to us how 
large a part was played in carrying out that provi- 
dential purpose by this one man Paul, for he was 
in truth a Roman citizen. He was a Jew also, a 



THE THREE TAVERNS 



65 



Hebrew of the Hebrews ; but his thoughts of gov- 
ernment and law were rather Roman than Jewish. 
He made friends with a Roman centurion more 
easily than with a Jewish priest. Almost from 
the beginning of his missionary labors he availed 
himself of the Roman provincial organization ; he 
adapted himself to it, or rather constrained it to 
serve him, his deliberate purpose being to claim 
for Jesus Christ that whole world which Rome 
had brought into the unity of a common law and 
civilization. 

No more enlightening book on any biblical sub- 
ject has been published within the last decade than 
the work by Professor Ramsay, of the University 
of Aberdeen, in which he treats of these very facts, 
and to which he gives the significant title, " St. 
Paul, the Traveler and the Roman Citizen." Yes, 
he was the Roman Citizen. Other men might 
claim some partial and superficial relation to the 
privilege of citizenship, like that chief captain in 
the castle in Jerusalem, who said, with a sigh : 
" With a great sum obtained I this freedom" ; but 
Paul could answer, " I was free born." No wonder 
then that Paul should have been drawn by so 
strong an attraction to the imperial city where he 
belonged by birth, and should have been writing 
for years to the Roman Christians of his earnest 

5 



66 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



longing to visit them, and to preach the gospel 
among them. That was the one city in all the 
world big enough for this man ; and this was the 
one man now living in all the world big enough 
for that city ; and one of the great purposes of 
divine Providence for that age was faihng its ac- 
complishment until the man and the city were 
brought together. Now the long journey is near- 
ing an end; the many delays and interruptions 
are behind him ; he is about to enter the last 
short stage of it. The Three Taverns is only 
seventeen miles or so from the Forum itself; 
and the tired traveler thanks God and takes 
courage, and pushes on toward his destiny in 
Rome. 

This man of whom we speak was the great mis- 
sionary of the early age. Of all the believers, he 
was the first fully to grasp the meaning of the 
Master when He said, " Go ye into all the world, 
and preach the gospel to the whole creation"; 
" Ye shall be my witnesses . . . unto the utter- 
most part of the earth " ; All authority hath 
been given unto me. ... Go ye, therefore, and 
make disciples of all the nations, . . . teaching 
them to observe all things whatsoever I com- 
manded you." Others had heard it ; but they 
were only Jews, their eyes darkened, their minds 



THE THREE TAVERNS 



67 



narrowed by Jewish prejudice, and they did not 
understand. But this man, though a Jew, was a 
Roman also, born to the freedom of the empire, 
and when he heard the words of Christ he 
quickly understood their meaning ; so the world 
became his parish. With boundless ambition he 
started forth to conquer the world for his King. 
He stands forth for all time as the example and 
leader of Christian missionaries. 

We want the imperial ambition of the great 
apostle in our modern Christianity. I say im- 
perial ambition ; it is so fine a word that one can- 
not afford to drop it just because it has been used 
in partisan political discussion. I do not propose 
to take sides here on disputed questions of national 
administration ; I do not wish to raise those ques- 
tions at all. Paul would not have felt called upon 
to choose sides as between the policies that had 
been dividing the Roman politicians, the poHcies 
of Marius and Sulla, or of Pompey and Caesar, 
or of Octavius and Marc Antony. There had 
been bitter partisan strife, cruelty, crime, and wrong 
enough in the process of Roman aggrandizement. 
But here, in the providence of God, stood now the 
result of that process, this world-wide empire — in 
some ways a grand and beneficent result ; and 
Paul was the man whom God had raised up to 



68 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



use that result for grander and more beneficent 
purposes than a Caesar ever dreamed of. 

So for us American Christians, whatever vi^e 
may think of the process of national development 
for the last few years, we stand to-day facing cer- 
tain accomplished results. Of course, as citizens, 
voters, we are still concerned with questions of 
governmental policy, and we must try to settle 
them as best we can ; but, as Christians, we are 
also concerned to use the result, whatever it may 
be, for the honor of our Master and the further- 
ance of His work of saving the world. The point 
I want to make is that we American Christians 
are facing to-day an imperial opportunity as truly 
as Paul was at the Three Taverns. If Paul's 
breath began to come quicker there because he 
could almost see Rome, I like to imagine how 
charged with excitement he would be if he could 
stand side by side with you and me this morning. 
If he had occasion to thank God then that he had 
been born a Roman citizen, I cannot seem to 
measure the gratitude that would fill his heart to- 
day could he find himself an American citizen. 
Let us think of him as standing among us ; let us 
try to catch his spirit. Let us call this particular 
Sunday our Three Taverns, and catch our breath 
for a little while as we turn our eyes forward. 



THE THREE TAVERNS 



69 



It is as Christians that we are looking forward, 
as servants of Jesus Christ, who must be eager 
to obey our Master's command and win the 
whole world for Him. What we want is an 
opportunity to do that — we are looking for an 
opportunity, and what sort of an opportunity do 
we see ? 

I was reading lately an account of that strangest 
of modern inventions which they call wireless 
telegraphy ; how ships have been speaking each 
other comfortably over leagues of ocean, and 
through leagues of impenetrable fog ; how signals 
have crossed the narrow seas, and now perhaps 
the broader ocean ; it is as if the poet's dream had 
come true of " Heaven's Cherubim horsed upon 
the sightless couriers of the air " ; so that men 
gravely propose before many years to be sending 
these messages from England to New Zealand 
through the air ; indeed, to arrange it so that at 
any point on the earth's surface you can lift up 
your voice and speak, and within a minute frac- 
tion of a second at any other point on the earth's 
surface whoever had the rightly tuned ear might 
hear your word. It is a wonderful invention, or 
should I say discovery ? It staggers the imagina- 
tion ; and yet it seems only a type of the strange 
historical processes of the last few years by which 



70 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



the ends of the earth have all been brought within 
speaking distance of our own America. 

How short a time it was ago — and yet how 
long it seems — that we still supposed ourselves 
indifferent politically to everything passing on the 
other side of the ocean. Foreign nations, rating 
us at our own estimate of ourselves, were con- 
temptuously indifferent to us and ignorant of us. 
The other day I came across a newspaper clip- 
ping, less than five years old, in one of my pigeon- 
holes, giving quotations from some of the Madrid 
newspapers of that date. Listen to this : " Word 
has just been received here that the Indians are 
rising against the Yankees in Illinois, Ohio, and 
other places. The farmers are petitioning the 
Government to protect them from the bloody 
savages, who are burning houses and kiUing on 
every side. * Buffalo Bill,' a notorious outlaw 
and leader of a band of half-breeds, has risen 
against the American Government, and is burning 
towns near his birthplace in New York." Or 
this : " There is but one railroad to transport the 
few thousand Yankee soldiers from the remote 
interior to the eastern seaboard; and that is an 
old and poorly constructed affair. At one place 
this railroad passes over Niagara Falls, a cataract 
one thousand feet high, near Labrador. At last 



THE THREE TAVERNS 



71 



accounts the bridge was in a very dangerous con- 
dition." Or this : " The country is not fit to 
Hve in. The climate is execrable. Avalanches 
threaten the principal cities. As for the people, 
besides the few whites engaged in business along 
the eastern shore, the remainder of the country is 
one vast plain, covered with Indians called cow- 
boys and vast herds of roaming cattle." Those 
papers were published in Spain, to be sure, and 
the other nations were not quite so indifferent to 
facts ; but it may give a notion as to what many 
of them were thinking about us — if they took the 
trouble to think at all — five or ten years ago. 

Now, is it not edifying to note the solicitude 
with which each ambassador tries to make it 
appear that his people was America's one stead- 
fast friend through the troublous days of the 
Spanish war ? The late friendly visit of the Ger- 
man Prince was very pleasant, but it did not occur 
to his imperial brother to send him five years ago. 
We have suddenly stepped into a place of great 
importance in the eyes of all the nations of the 
earth. 

Meanwhile, willing or unwilling, we find our- 
selves planted for the time in the far East. We 
find our soldiers marching side by side with the 
armies of Europe in the relief of Peking ; we find 



72 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



our Government suggesting and doing much to 
secure the poHcy by which a settlement is reached 
in China — the poHcy of the open door ; and, as a 
consequence, we find our Government the one 
toward which the Chinese rulers and people look 
with some confidence for just and friendly treat- 
ment. So it has come to pass that every word 
spoken at Washington is quickly heard over there 
at the uttermost parts of the earth, and treated 
with new deference. That is to say, the current 
of events has swung us, wilHng or unwilling, into 
this position of commanding world-wide influence 
and responsibility. Our comfortable provincial 
wall, behind which we had sheltered ourselves for 
more than a hundred years, is gone forever ; and 
for good or ill, we Americans have joined hands 
with the remotest peoples of the earth. Now, that 
is what we see as we look ahead from our Three 
Taverns on this particular day and year of grace. 
That is the opportunity. 

What shall we make of it ? If we were a lot of 
Pharisees, hugging to ourselves our narrow Jewish 
prejudices, I suppose we should make nothing of 
it. We would think it our one business to mo- 
nopolize the blessings of our rehgion for our own 
profit; to shut the Gentiles out of our holy place. 
But if we are Christians, if any of the Spirit which 



THE THREE TAVERNS 



73 



Christ breathed into His great apostle has been 
breathed into us, these signs of the times will 
make us tremble with excitement. Once more 
by conflicts of the nations, by the shock of fleets 
and armies, the way has been opened before us. 
Once more God has set before His Church an 
imperial opportunity to reach the whole world 
with His message. Eighteen centuries ago the 
apostle, born to the freedom of the Roman Empire, 
found large scope for his ambition. He might 
have found still larger scope had God set him in 
the world to-day — an American missionary. Oh, 
that God would give His own people among us 
courage and magnanimity enough for so great an 
opportunity ! 

You may be sure that other elements of our 
national life are awake to the present opportunity, 
and are trying to make the most of it in their 
several ways ; but their attempts may or may not 
conduce to the good name of our people and the 
welfare of the world. Our politicians are awake 
to it, and already are trying to make political capi- 
tal out of the present state of affairs, to count on 
the one side or the other at the next Presidential 
election. Our merchants and manufacturers are 
awake to it, quite properly so, and are fully deter- 
mined not to be robbed of their share of the im- 



74 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



mense market opening up on the other side of the 
world for the products of civilization. Our dis- 
tillers and brewers, I suppose, are awake to the 
opportunity — not to say our gamblers and all the 
purveyors of vice. 

In every newly opened foreign port the Ameri- 
can flag is likely to wave over some establishment 
which will be a curse to its neighborhood and a 
reproach to our nation. These various sorts of 
people are wide enough awake to what they re- 
gard their own interests in the present emergency ; 
but we cannot believe that any of them have fully 
opened their eyes to God's purpose in this present 
emergency. Just as the apostle was the one man 
to face the power of a Caesar, and not be crazed 
by it, so there is just one institution in America 
which can, if it will, get the divinely intended use 
out of this imperial opportunity which opens be- 
fore America, and that is the Church of Jesus 
Christ. The ends of the earth have been brought 
together. The white man, and the yellow man, 
and the brown man, and the black man touch. 
The result may be immeasurable disaster to all ; 
but you and I have in our hands the power of de- 
termining that the result shall be rather infinite 
blessing to all. Oh, that we might see something 
of what Paul saw from the Three Taverns, when 



THE THREE TAVERNS 



75 



he thanked God and took courage. Oh, that 
something of his imperial ambition might take 
hold of our modern Christianity. Oh, that we 
might discern a little of God's saving purpose in 
this sudden extension of American influence over 
the whole world. 

I have spoken of Paul's imperial ambition ; I 
might have called it his prophetic discernment; 
he saw the vision, and he obeyed. But you must 
not think that he always saw it so clearly as to 
make the obedience perfectly easy. Both the 
seeing and the doing called for heroic resolution. 
Difficulties and discouragements were his daily 
lot ; without were fightings and within were fears. 
Rival teachers traveled after him wherever he 
went, undoing much of his work. His most 
promising converts often apostatized. He some- 
times expressed the fear that he had run in vain 
and labored in vain. He was no stranger to moods 
of depression ; and evidently one of these moods 
was threatening to settle over him as he ap- 
proached the Three Taverns. There he was, 
almost in sight of Rome. So near the end of 
his long journey, and at the end what if he should 
find nothing but failure and disillusionment ? But 
now certain brethren from Rome, hearing of his 
approach, came out to meet him. It was a very 



76 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



simple act of Christian courtesy. We do not 
know their names, — very plain people, I fancy, — 
but they had kind hearts. They beHeved in 
Christ, and in Paul, His servant, and so they came 
out to meet Paul as far as Appii Forum and the 
Three Taverns ; and it was when he saw them 
that his faith flashed up again, and he thanked 
God and took courage. 

I suppose it takes a certain heroism of faith 
to-day fully to beheve in the coming triumph of 
Christianity. The obstacles are immense, the 
progress is slow ; there are perils and persecutions 
abroad ; some of the bravest, as we remember here 
with emotion, falling at their posts. Worse yet, 
there is much to discourage us at home, in the 
decay of faith and the spreading corruption of 
morals ; the diminishing accessions to our churches, 
the advance of secularism. It takes a certain 
heroism of faith for a modern American to believe 
that the cross of Jesus Christ is still the sign of 
victory. We often are depressed by the outlook. 
It is a comfort to me to know that the great 
apostle also knew the meaning of depression. 
But at the Three Taverns he was lifted out of his 
depression, and he found heart again to thank 
God and take courage. So shall we find heart 
to-day. A faith for which men and w^omen have 



THE THREE TAVERNS 



77 



been laying down their lives in martyrdom, as 
they have within the last few months in China, is 
not a dying faith. If some brave soldiers are fall- 
ing at their posts, others start for the front. Yes, 
the difficulties are evident enough, but, after all, 
this has been a year of almost unexampled mani- 
festation of divine power on the mission field. 
Have you heard of those extraordinary religious 
movements this last year among the students in 
the Universities of Japan and China ? And, here 
at home, have you heard of that University For- 
eign Mission, the first effort of the kind in this 
country, which is taking shape even now among 
the students in New Haven ? I tell you, there is 
enough to see from our Three Taverns to set an 
apostle, if he were here, thanking God and taking 
courage. 

Perhaps most of us would hardly like to class 
ourselves with the apostle. That clear discern- 
ment, that burning enthusiasm, that imperial am- 
bition, which made him the first man of the age, 
seem beyond our reach ; they belong to creatures 
of more heroic mold. But I like to think of 
the other parties in that little conference, those 
brethren who came out to meet him there at the 
Three Taverns. By the utmost stretch of my 
imagination I cannot see myself filling Paul's 



78 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



place ; but it does not seem altogether impossible 
that by God's help I might have filled the place 
of one of those brethren. 

You and I have not come up to our Three Tav- 
erns this morning as great leaders of the Church 
in her missionary enterprise; but we might, by 
this day's doings and givings, show enough kindly 
interest in the enterprise, that the apostle himself, 
if he were here — or the apostle's Master, if He 
were here, would thank God and take courage. 



V 



THE POWER OF PERSONALITY: 
A WORD TO STUDENTS 



V 



THE POWER OF PERSONALITY: A WORD TO 
STUDENTS 

" Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming 
of the great and dreadful day of the Lord." — Mal. iv. : 5, 

This is part of the very last sentence of the very 
last book of the Old Testament ; in other words, 
it has been placed where it must stand for a kind 
of climax of all that the Lord had chosen to reveal 
to his ancient people. The time was one of un- 
certainty and apprehension. These Jews, lately 
returned from their exile in Babylon, were much 
perplexed, and in danger of complete demoraliza- 
tion. To save them from this, the prophet gives 
a clear promise of the coming day of their God ; 
and to make this promise as clear and expressive 
and impressive as it could possibly be made, he 
names it from a man. " I will send you Elijah." 
Think what a tremendous impression that man 
Elijah must have made on the people of his own 
age — that now, five hundred years after he was 
dead, his name should still seem more significant 

6 81 



82 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



than any other word in the entire Hebrew vocabu- 
lary to show men what the day of God must be ! 

It gives us some sense of the power of human 
personaUty. It seems that God's greatest piece of 
work so far was not the sun, or the moon, or the 
stars, or any other material thing ; not the plagues 
of Egypt, the dividing of the Red Sea, or any 
other miracle of Providence ; but a greater work 
than any of these, outranking them all in the order 
of revelation — nothing else than the raising up of 
one such man as Elijah. That is the last word of 
the whole old Covenant : " I will send you Elijah 
the prophet." 

Yes, it shows the power of human personality — 
that is, the possible power; but evidently a power 
not always actualized, for if you turn back to the 
days of this same Elijah, the impression made 
upon you by the mass of the people generally is 
not of strength, but of contemptible weakness ; 
they seem of no character, no conviction, no faith, 
no religion of their own, and no politics and no 
morals ; bowing before Baal yesterday ; to-day 
crying, Jehovah, he is God " ; to-morrow bowing 
before Baal again — mere weathercocks, blown 
about by every wind of doctrine, always going as 
they were drawn by some stronger force from with- 
out; hardly fit to be called men and women, but 



THE POWER OF PERSONALITY 83 



rather the shapeless clay which might possibly be 
formed into men and women. How long are 
you going to limp back and forth between two 
opinions ?" the strong prophet cried to them con- 
temptuously. It makes one think of the wretched 
crowd of shades whom Dante says he saw on the 
nearer side of the river Styx, who had not dis- 
tinct character enough to get them into hell, for 
Divine justice and mercy both spurned them," 
the poet says. Among all these people just two 
persons were well worth naming — one was this 
man Elijah, champion of the righteous God, and 
the other was Jezebel, the young, beautiful, daring, 
cruel Phoenician princess, who had lately become 
the wife of Ahab, and at once proved herself the 
real ruler of the nation. They are the two living 
characters in the drama. You may have seen in 
some old picture an angel and a devil playing at 
chess for the soul of a man. You seem to see 
Elijah and Jezebel playing for this nation Israel ; 
but the nation itself, the mass of the people, have 
no say in the matter; the best player will get 
them. 

At first the contest would have seemed ridicu- 
lously one-sided. Jezebel, sharing the throne, 
had all the resources of the state at her disposal, 
and with the further distinction of her birth, for 



84 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



she was a princess of Phoenicia. You know the 
preeminence of the Phoenicians at that period in 
the world's civiHzation ; hke the Athenians at a 
later date, they were now the leaders in com- 
merce, wealth, letters, art — the parent state of 
Carthage. Their religion was the worship of 
Baal — that is, the Sun, that great god of the day, 
who under one name or another seems to have 
dominated almost every system of ancient poly- 
theism. If you ride up the long valley or pass 
between the two Lebanon ranges, a little back 
from ancient Tyre and Sidon,your guide will point 
out to you along the ridge of these two ranges, at 
intervals of a mile or so, the sites of ancient temples 
of Baal, where, I suppose, the priests of that god 
watched for the very first gleams of the rising sun, 
that they might offer their adoration. Just at the 
summit of the pass you come upon the magnifi- 
cent ruin of Baalbec — the great temple of the Sun, 
the wonder and despair of later architects. Those 
immense blocks of stone, so deftly fitted to each 
other in the wall, — blocks more than twenty feet 
wide, some of them seventy feet long, — mark the 
strength of that religion which Jezebel was suc- 
cessfully introducing among the Israelites. The 
power which laid one above another the several 
courses of that ancient Phoenician temple was the 



THE POWER OF PERSONALITY 85 



very power which this ancient Phoenician princess 
held in her hands. How irresistible it was ! No 
wonder the weak nation of Israel had proved 
tractable to such a ruler — all the people bowing 
the knee to Jezebel's god Baal. To outward ap- 
pearance the queen had gained the entire people — 
every soul in the land, except one man. 

Ah, but that was just it; he was a man; and, 
as a man he weighed more than any stone in the 
great temple of Baal ; more than all those temples 
together. For a time it did not look so ; it seemed 
he must be crushed — this one man against king 
and queen and people and priests. The queen 
thought so, for she vowed she would have his 
life to-morrow. He himself thought so in a mo- 
ment of weakness, and prayed despairingly that 
he might die. " It is enough," he said. But it 
was not to be so. By some secret power that 
had come into him, this one man would yet 
outpuU them all ; some day the people would 
see Queen Jezebel dying in miserable defeat and 
humiliation ; and that temple of Baal tumbling 
into ruins, good for nothing except to amuse a 
tourist's hoHday ; while the nation of Israel would 
be drawn the way that one man of God had pulled 
them ; and even five hundred years after his death 
prophets would still be using the name of that 



86 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



one man and the splendor of his triumph to invig- 
orate the people's faith. " I will send you Elijah 
the prophet before the great and dreadful day of 
the Lord." 

I do not know how fully Malachi understood 
what he was saying, but the words standing at 
the end of the Old Testament become for us a 
prophecy of Jesus Christ. And surely there was 
no better way to give the ancient Jews some sense 
of what the coming Christ's day would be like 
than to connect it with the name of some strong 
human character such as Elijah. For Christ's 
work was to be one great illustration of the tre- 
mendous power of personality. That is what the 
Christian doctrine of the incarnation means : it 
means divine personality; that all power, the 
Almighty Himself, who before had surrounded 
men as an awful presence which they never could 
hope to escape, but never could quite reach — that 
this Almighty Being had now set Himself before 
human thought, and brought Himself into human 
history, through this one person, Jesus Christ, the 
unseen God henceforth personified to our race in 
Jesus Christ His Son ; and so all those vague 
divine attractions which had always been pulling 
the wayward souls of men toward holiness and 
truth become henceforth concentrated and per- 



THE POWER OF PERSONALITY 87 



petuated and continually revived in the personal 
influence of Jesus Christ. The whole power of 
the Christian religion for saving nations and men 
measures for us the personal influence of Jesus 
Christ; and the final triumph of Christianity, when 
it comes, will be the triumph of personal force 
over all opposing conditions. 

What a power it was that was set loose in this 
world when that one Child was born in Bethlehem ! 
How little they could appreciate the reach and 
sweep of this power who first looked upon this 
Child lying helpless in the manger ; or even those 
who afterwards heard the Boy questioning wisely 
in the temple ; or even those who still afterwards 
saw the Man healing certain sick people, calming 
the winds that blew over a little lake, feeding a few 
thousand hungry men and women ; or even those 
who saw Him hanging on the cross, then risen 
from the grave, and then ascending into heaven ! 
Many people to-day are finding it hard to believe 
what the New Testament relates concerning those 
supernatural works of Jesus Christ ; but whether 
you have learned to believe or not, all those works 
put together, as exhibitions of power, do not com- 
pare with what our own eyes see in the world 
to-day of the personal influence of Jesus. You 
have heard that oft-quoted remark of Napoleon's 



88 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



(whether the Frenchman ever said it or not does 
not matter much ; he could not have said a truer 
thing) when he is said to have contrasted his own 
crumbling empire and those of Alexander, Caesar, 
and Charlemagne — empires founded on force and 
soon passing away — with the empire which Jesus 
Christ founded upon love; and "at this hour 
millions of men would die for Him." 

There never has been anything Hke it in the 
world as an exhibition of enduring personal force. 
No wonder if the old prophet, gazing toward the 
future glory, found himself unable to give any fair 
description of what he saw, any suitable announce- 
ment of the day of such a Lord, except by using 
some personal name, the name of some well- 
known man, whose enduring personal influence 
would at least faintly suggest to the people what 
the Christ's saving power shall be like. 

Elijah, and afterwards John Baptist, were fore- 
runners of Jesus Christ; and so by prophetic 
analogy we can reason up from them to Him. 
' But He Himself encouraged men to reason on 
from Him to His disciples. They should do 
greater works than He ever had done. He said ; 
for the same kind of power that Jesus Christ 
exercised through His divine character has now 
been committed to every Christian to be exer- 



THE POWER OF PERSONALITY 89 



cised. Wherever that kind of power is used, it is 
still the greatest power known. The most glori- 
ous chapters of history are those that tell of some 
man here and there, some solitary Elijah against 
Israel, or " Athanasius against the world," as the 
saying was ; or Martin Luther before the Imperial 
Diet with his, " Here I stand ; I can do none 
other; God help me, Amen" — some man who 
by the magnificence of the manhood that was in 
him, by his immeasurable personal force, has been 
strong enough to set his own strength against the 
world, and actually pull the world his way. 

But where could any man get such power as 
that ? The mere wording of the question compels 
the answer, that in some way he must have got 
it from God. " The Spirit of the Lord had come 
upon him," they used to say of Elijah and the 
other old prophets. He was filled with the Holy 
Ghost from his birth," they said of John Baptist. 
" He was none other than God Himself manifested 
in the flesh," they said of Jesus. And Christ's 
word to His disciples was, " Ye shall receive power, 
after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you." 
The power is from God. 

Oh, but we have been so apt to think that the 
Spirit of God, if He ever came into a man, would 
crush out of him all strong and interesting indi- 



90 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



viduality, levelling all sorts of men and women to 
one monotonous plane of pious commonplace. 
But can it be so ? That God whose works have 
never shown any of that depressing uniformity; 
who gives a little different shape to every leaf, a 
little different shade to every flower — these traits 
of separate personality to every several thing He 
ever made ; when He comes to deal with men and 
women, the only earthly creatures He has who 
really deserve to be called persons, do you sup- 
pose that with them His purpose will be to crush 
out and smooth away all these attractive personal 
traits, and exalt His own glory by rubbing out 
His own creation ? No, no ; look at a man like 
Simon Peter, before the Spirit of God filled him, 
and then afterwards : before it, that trembling 
coward in the high priest's palace ; after it, that 
audacious denouncer of the whole Jewish nation 
on his Pentecostal pulpit — look at him, if you 
have ever thought that breathing in the Spirit of 
God could make a man smaller. The man was 
only half-made before ; the best part of him had 
not appeared ; no one dreamed how much was in 
him, and he himself least of all. He never came 
to himself until he came to God — until the Spirit 
of the living God came into him. 

We are talking about the power of human per- 



THE POWER OF PERSONALITY 



sonality — the possible power ; the power of man- 
hood, when you can really find a full-grown man. 
Do you know, if there is any place in this world 
where one ought to make sure of finding at least 
one or two of them it should be in a great school ? 
Our colleges and universities are homes of learn- 
ing, of course ; but that must not be the whole 
of it, nor the best of it. That a scholar should 
have read through a few books, more or less, 
may be important, but it is not the most important 
matter. In what we call a liberal education, as 
distinct from a merely technical education, the 
mere learning is always subsidiary to culture — 
culture of manhood. Men are what we want. Not 
mere depositories of information — your library is 
that ; or calculating or investigating machines — 
your laboratory is that ; but men who have really 
come to themselves, who have been lifted out of 
the disorganized mass of commonplace humanity ; 
who have some personal conviction and personal 
character, and therefore, in the long campaign of 
light against darkness, order against chaos, right 
against wrong, heaven against hell, can exert some 
personal force for determining events. 

They needed such men long ago in the olden 
time, when poor Israel, like a flock of foolish 
sheep, were ready to trot after any and every 



92 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



leader who whistled to them — all worshiping 
Baal one day, the next day all crying, " Jehovah, 
He is the God." At that time, what saved the 
entire nation from ruin was the presence among 
them of one man of culture. I say of culture; 
Elijah's scholarship we have no means of testing, 
though, I suspect, he might have stood even such 
an examination better than most of his contempo- 
raries ; for it appears that the sons of the 
prophets," the scholars of the day, all owned him 
as master ; but, at all events, his culture we can 
test, for we know that he was a man grown ; he 
had come to himself ; he stood for personal power 
enough to hold back a whole nation from apostacy. 

They needed such a person then, but I think 
we have almost equal need of such persons to-day. 
Any description of the strange characterlessness 
of the masses of people in ancient Israel would 
not need very much changing to fit it to the 
masses of people in a modern state — so many of 
them without convictions of their own, or faith, 
or morals, or political principle. You can find 
nothing stranger in all Jewish history in the way 
of religious vagary than our own time has seen in 
the growth of Mormonism out in Utah. I doubt 
if a complete record of Jewish political history 
would reveal anything stranger than some of the 



THE POWER OF PERSONALITY 



infectious delusions that have afflicted our voters 
from time to time on the subject of the currency. 
And as to morals, the deal that Queen Jezebel 
made with the elders of the city by which she got 
possession of poor Naboth's vineyard for her hus- 
band, the king, was no more unscrupulous than 
some of the manoeuvers by which the saloon- 
keepers and lawbreakers have maintained their 
power over the municipal government in our larger 
cities. The masses of the people cannot be ac- 
cused of enjoying all these things, — they are 
ashamed of them, but they seem not to know 
enough to stop them ; they appear to be drifting 
about after every chance leader in politics, in 
fashion, in moral custom, in religious belief Each 
new doctrine, however crazy, has its host of dis- 
ciples. What we need, and always have needed, 
and always shall need for the public safety, is a 
man, here and there, among the crowd — one who 
is no longer a child blown about by every wind 
of doctrine, but a man grown, able to think his 
own thoughts, see with his own eyes, choose his 
own ground and hold it, whatever others say and 
wherever others go — that is, a man of culture, 
strong enough to stand for something, and leave 
a mark that will stay in the course of human 
events. 



94 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



I would be far from saying that such culture is 
to be found only among college graduates. To 
think so would be the height of scholastic pharisa- 
ism. But I will say that a chief purpose of all 
university training must be to furnish that kind of 
culture, and that any graduate who fails to show 
some degree of it has not made the best use of 
the privileges afforded him. 

The whole world has been moved more than 
once by what started quietly in some college — 
two or three students moving each other, or all 
moved by a teacher, and the movement spreading 
to the ends of the earth ; two or three college 
boys praying round a haystack at Williamstown 
fourscore years ago, and soon all the nations of 
heathendom will be covered with American mis- 
sions. Wesley and two or three others at Oxford 
roused to more earnest prayer for the Spirit of 
God, and soon a new wave of spiritual power will 
be felt all over Christendom. Indeed, the later 
revival in the Church of England whose end is not 
yet, started with Newman and Pusey and Keble 
and other scholars at Oxford. Back a little further, 
Luther and another scholar or two at Wittenberg, 
digging earnestly into the old Bible, and soon all 
Europe will be shaken by the great Reformation. 

And long before, in Galilee, the beginning of 



THE POWER OF PERSONALITY 95 



the gospel was that the Master drew a few dis- 
ciples about Him. "The Master"; for you know 
that is the one commonest title for our Lord in 
the gospel history ; and the word does not mean 
master in the sense that one might be master of a 
house, or of a ship, or of a company of servants : 
it is the schoolmaster, teacher; and, therefore, 
those who turned to Jesus were disciples, scholars. 
In other words, it was a little college which Jesus 
estabHshed in Galilee as the beginning of His 
church and kingdom — a college without endow- 
ment, without dormitories or lecture halls, without 
library or fixed place of abode, or any other of 
the kinds of equipment which can be purchased 
with money. But this college had forms of equip- 
ment such as never can be got with money. 
There was a Teacher, and there were learners, 
all associated in such ways that they should be 
of the greatest possible service to one another; 
and, indeed, a spirit of very cordial good fellow- 
ship among these learners was one of the best 
lessons they got from their teacher — that they 
should love one another as He had loved them. 
The result of a course at that little college was to 
turn out men — men with such solidity of man- 
hood in them, that is, so invigorated by the spirit 
of God which their Master had breathed into 



96 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



them, that they would start out from their studies 
with Him and proceed to turn the whole world 
upside down. 

Have you reflected that the only work that 
Jesus did in the world whose results seemed to 
survive after His own short life came to an end, 
was the founding and teaching of this college? 
The people had expected other things and greater 
things of Him for a while. Many were amazed by 
His wonderful works for a while ; the multitudes 
were stirred by His strange tone of authority; 
rumors were in the air that He should be made 
a King. But, one day, His enemies took Him 
and nailed Him to His cross, and then all those 
anticipations of greatness vanished. After Christ 
was gone, the only discoverable result of His work 
in the world was this little company of disciples 
left behind Him ; this little company of learners, 
young men whom He had drawn about Him and 
kept near Him, making them trust and love Him, 
teaching them, patiently working some true man- 
hood into each of them. So the humble personal 
influence exerted for two or three years over these 
twelve scholars proved to be the beginning of the 
power of Jesus to move the whole world. 

In every college community there is still a great 
chance for a man to count for something. Even 



THE POWER OF PERSONALITY 97 



in a college there are apt to be many who have 
not yet learned anything better than to swell a 
crowd and drift with a crowd. But wherever you 
can find among them a man who has some faith 
of his own, some conviction, some moral principle, 
and who can stand for his principles, though he 
should have to stand alone, even in college that 
is a most valuable discovery; every such man 
counts. 



7 



VI 

"BUT IF NOT" 



L.ofC. 



VI 



"BUT IF NOT" 

" But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not 
serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set 
up." — Daniel iii. i8. 

There are two books in the Old Testament 
which have stirred up an unusual amount of 
critical controversy — the Book of Jonah and the 
Book of Daniel. Some of us, who are tired of 
controversy, and would rather feed our souls with 
such truths and scriptures as we can be sure of, may 
have inclined to neglect these books for this rea- 
son ; but it is a mistake. However you understand 
them, and to whatever human authors you credit 
them, these two books stand among the greatest 
even of these inspired writings : the Book of Jonah, 
with its splendid revelation of God's compassion 
toward all His creatures, even to the little chil- 
dren and the dumb cattle of the heathen city of 
Nineveh ; and the Book of Daniel, which offers, 
as Dean Stanley says, " the first essay at a philos- 
ophy of history — the first recognition of the truth 
that the story of the fortunes of humanity is not 

lOI 



I02 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



a mere disjointed tale, but is a regular develop- 
ment on a majestic plan, in which the divine 
economy is as deeply concerned as in the fate 
of the Chosen People." 

But the Book of Daniel is more than a philos- 
ophy of universal history : it is also a sort of epic 
of martyrdom. Our Lord said, in His Beati- 
tudes : " Blessed are they which are persecuted 
for righteousness' sake : for theirs is the kingdom 
of heaven " ; and if you want a whole book full 
of splendid illustration and confirmation of that 
saying, you find it in this Book of Daniel. 

Take these Hebrew children, with their outland- 
ish names, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego : 
they seem to stand as typical representatives of 
all God's martyred saints in all the ages ; the 
fierce heat of that furnace, seven times heated, 
with which King Nebuchadnezzar threatened 
them, brings to our thought all the hot fires of 
persecution wherever and whenever they may 
have been kindled ; it might be in Babylon, or it 
might be in Jerusalem, or in Rome, or at Smith- 
field, or at Oxford, or in Paotingfu. 

" Will you, or will you not, fall down and wor- 
ship my golden image ? " says the king. In the 
record his name happens to be Nebuchadnezzar ; 
but it might be almost any other name ; for that 



'BUT IF NOT' 



103 



is the kind of question despotic kings and queens 
have always been asking of their subjects. " Will 
you, or will you not, fall down and worship the 
image that I have set up ? " And most of the 
people have always made haste to answer, " Why, 
yes, your majesty, anything you say." For is not 
this speaker the king, and has he not the power, 
if they displease him, to cast them into the burn- 
ing, fiery furnace ? Indeed, most of the people 
fall down and worship his image before he has 
had time to ask them to worship it. 

But there may be some who hesitate, some 
three or four — non-conformists, you might call 
them — who are not quite ready to take their 
religion at a king's command, or to put their 
conscience into his keeping. They hesitate, as if 
they might possibly refuse to fall down and wor- 
ship. And when the angry king turns toward 
them and says, for the last time, Will you bow 
down and worship ? Quick ; answer yes or no," 
I tell you the whole world waits to hear the an- 
swer. It will be worthy of an epic poem if they 
give the right answer. In comparison with them, 
all the rest of the nation are of no account now ; 
those other people who will worship obediently 
whatever the king says, — Bel, or Dagon, or Baal, 
or Jehovah, or Nebuchadnezzar's image, — they are 



I04 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



not worth counting now ; we do not care whether 
there are a hundred of them, or a hundred million. 
But these three men, who have nearly decided to 
settle the great matter for themselves — the most 
important question of human history so far has 
been. What sort of reply are those three men 
going to make to the king ? If, after a pause, they 
should answer, with the rest, " Yes, O king, we 
will fall down and worship with all the rest of the 
people. It must be right, since the king com- 
mands it and all the people do it; and, anyway, 
that furnace is too hot to think of ; we will con- 
form " — if that is their reply, then instantly these 
men lose all interest for us. Turn over the page ; 
see if we can find any other man or set of men 
better worth reading about. 

But if these three men will not say " Yes," if 
they still maintain their stubborn non-conformity, 
then we do not turn over the pages. We have 
to wait, the whole world seems to be waiting, for 
their further reply. 

In Babylon these three men would not say 
" Yes " ; the king's act of uniformity would not 
work with them. They said " No " ; and they said 
it deliberately, thoughtfully, facing all the possi- 
bilities of the case, and in the face of them all they 
still said " No." Let me read their answer in full, 



'BUT IF NOT' 



for men have not often spoken words better wortli 
hearing. 

" Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, answered 
and said to the king, O Nebuchadnezzar, we are 
not careful to answer thee in this matter. If it be 
so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us 
from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver 
us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it 
known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve 
thy gods, nor worship the golden image which 
thou hast set up." 

They face these two possibilities : " If it be so " ; 
" if not." It may be that their God will yet deliver 
them from Nebuchadnezzar's power. The com- 
mon run of people could not so much as conceive 
of that possibility. Nebuchadnezzar's power 
seemed so great and manifest that they believed 
it irresistible. None could deliver any one out of 
his hand. Their sense and imagination were alto- 
gether overwhelmed by his royal magnificence. 
But there always have been some who could see 
more clearly, some three or four men who were 
not quite so much dazzled by Nebuchadnezzar. 
His power is great, but they can see that it is not 
absolute or eternal. There might be some hopes 
for an opposition party even in Babylon ; and if 
some day the king issues a particularly outrageous 



io6 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



decree, they think there is a chance that it might 
be successfully resisted. If the chance seems a 
fairly good one, not a few men in the kingdom 
will be wiUing to take it. In the language of our 
text, so long as they think that God is likely to 
deliver them out of the hands of Nebuchadnezzar 
they will not fall down and worship the king's 
golden image. You might name Erasmus as a 
conspicuous representative of that kind of non- 
conformists. 

That kind of non-conformity is a useful thing, 
too, so far as it goes. It is a sort of faith in the 
invisible. To believe that Nebuchadnezzar is not 
so big as he looks ; to beheve that there is some 
Being stronger than he ; and that if brave men set 
themselves vigorously enough against his tyranny 
they may probably succeed ; it is a good thing. 
We are glad to find as many such believers in the 
kingdom as we can. If there should prove to be 
enough of them, and if their opposition is earnest 
enough, even proud King Nebuchadnezzar will 
think twice before he tries conclusions with them. 
The king might bluster savagely, but if he had 
found anything like half his subjects holding their 
heads high before his image he would have dis- 
covered some way of modifying that edict. But, 
however useful that kind of non-conformity, it is 



' BUT IF NOT ' 



107 



not the very best ; for what if it should prove that 
the king is able to carry out his threat ? This time 
everything is going his way, and nothing is left 
for the opposition except that burning fiery fur- 
nace. Well, then, these people, Erasmus and 
others of that temper, are careful to make their 
peace in time. If the true God is not going to 
deliver His servants from the king, then they will 
have to change sides. 

But in Babylon were three non-conformists of a 
stiffer temper. " If it be so," they said hopefully; 

but if not, even if our God will not deliver us, 
we are not going to worship your golden image." 

Ah, friends, that is the one thing that makes 
any city or any land really worth reading about — 
if it has had two or three such men in it. It is 
the one thing that makes this old world of ours 
worth reading about, to know that in the worst 
of times it has had two or three such men in it. 
" Even if God will not deliver us, we are not going 
to worship the image." 

In times of religious persecution they are what 
really count ; and in other times, too ; for there 
are other tests that try men's souls besides the hot 
fires of persecution. Take it in the commoner 
relations of life, as regards such simple matters as 
honesty, we will say. In what we call the busi- 



io8 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



ness world, there has been set up an immense 
golden image, which receives the worship of 
crowds of people. Literally, they fall down " 
and worship it. They fall quickly, and they fall 
far from every standard of uprightness in their 
reverence for that golden image. 

It is a pitiful spectacle, humihating, to see what 
men will do, and women, for the sake of money — 
how far they will stoop, how low they will grovel, 
for the sake of money. Every one can tell you 
about this worship of the golden image ; even the 
cartoons in our comic newspapers are full of im- 
pressive sermons on the subject. They show you 
the crowd falling down and worshiping the golden 
image ; and it is always shown in a way to make 
you ashamed that you should have to acknowledge 
any sort of relationship to that ignoble crowd. 

But whether the picture shows them or not, 
you know that there are some exceptions — men 
who have not fallen down with that crowd of 
idolaters. Every community holds some few men 
of clearer discernment who can see that any par- 
ticular image which the people are worshiping is 
only plated after all. They can see that the abject 
worshipers of the image are likely to be disap- 
pointed ; for in the long run, in the larger outlook, 
they see that " honesty is the best policy." They 



"BUT IF NOT' 



109 



see it; that is to say, they believe it; it is not 
direct sight of the eyes, but a kind of faith ; they 
beheve with a good deal of confidence that it will 
pay them better in the end to be honest; that 
the honest God of things as they are is stronger 
than the braggart Nebuchadnezzar and his golden 
image. Therefore, generally, they will not bow 
down. They have faith enough to keep them on 
their feet most of the time. Would there were 
more even of that kind of honesty in the world — 
the kind of honesty which stands because it is be- 
lieved to be really the best policy. 

But, after all, every man knows in his own soul 
that if that is all, it is not the truest, purest hon- 
esty. Just suppose it should prove in any par- 
ticular instance that honesty is not the best poHcy ; 
in this particular instance the honest man is going 
to be ruined and disgraced, and the dishonest 
man is going to make a fortune, and live and die 
respected of his neighbors; it happens so occa- 
sionally. The worshipers of the golden image 
are going to get the gold occasionally, and the 
three true men are going to be cast into the burn- 
ing, fiery furnace; and there is none who will 
deliver them out of the hand of Nebuchadnezzar. 
Well, thank God, three or four men are going to 
stand firm on their principles even then. Even if 



no FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



honesty is not the best poHcy, they will be honest. 
Even if God should not deliver them, they will 
not fall down and worship the golden image. 
Thank God, there are some such men of the true 
martyr spirit even in the business world; the 
world is not worthy of them, but its credit rests 
upon their shoulders. 

Some of us were touched a few years ago by 
an example of faithfulness to principle on the part 
of a few college lads in Paris. These American 
collegians had been invited to go over and com- 
pete in the games at the Paris Exposition ; but 
they would not consent to go unless the authori- 
ties would agree that the games should not be 
held on Sunday. At first the college boys all 
stood together in this demand, with the hope that 
their united demand would be effectual and they 
would be delivered from the necessity of stooping 
to the continental ways of Sunday-keeping. But 
just at the end it was found that their demand 
had not been effectual ; their God had not deliv- 
ered them; the games were coming off on Sunday. 

Then some of the boys weakened. I do not 
undertake to pass judgment upon them ; I do not 
know what their personal convictions may have 
been. At all events, some of the boys surrendered 
their former position. But we were proud that a 



"BUT IF NOT" 



III 



goodly number of the boys did not weaken. It 
was a hard test for a handful of lads, so far from 
home, in a land where every one would be dis- 
posed to laugh at their scruples ; and it meant 
that they were relinquishing honors almost cer- 
tainly within their reach, so that their long journey 
must go for nothing; but they would not sur- 
render their conviction, whatever happened, even 
if their God would not reward their faith by bend- 
ing the arrangements their way ; these boys would 
not fall down and worship the image which Nebu- 
chadnezzar had set up. 

I thank God that our American colleges are 
turning out some boys of that quality. The 
record these students made counts for more than 
if one of them had outrun a locomotive, or jumped 
over the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Oh, I wish 
more of us could reach that toughness of convic- 
tion with regard to our Sunday-keeping and every 
other kind of principle, that we might say, " If 
it be so, we believe our God is able to shape 
things so that obeying His will need not work us 
any real inconvenience or loss," — and very often 
He does — "but if not — but if not, be it known 
unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, 
nor worship the golden image which thou hast 
set up." 



112 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



But these words not only bear upon questions 
of practical duty ; they bear also upon the deeper 
questions of personal faith. Those of us who con- 
fess the Christian faith believe that our God can, 
and will, keep our souls safe in life and in death, in 
this world and in the world to come ; that He will 
make all things work together for good to us ; 
that He will withhold no good thing from us. So 
long as we believe this confidently, we can serve 
Him in dark days with a kind of triumphant joy. 
But suppose the time should come when this 
bright faith is darkened; or suppose others of us 
have never yet attained it ? We should like to 
believe all this ; we try to ; we hope that it may 
be true ; but we are encompassed by a great deal 
of doubt about it ; everything beyond this little 
present which our eyes can now see seems so 
dreadfully uncertain. This was the state of the 
old Psalmist when he said, " As with a sword in 
my bones, mine enemies reproach me ; while they 
say daily unto me. Where is thy God ?" He had 
no answer ready. 

If not, what then ? If perhaps this hope of a 
Christian is only a delusion, and we shall have 
suffered so much, and denied ourselves so much 
for nothing, what shall we say to that? Oh, 
friends, remember there have been some men who 



"BUT IF NOT* 



113 



could say even then that they would hold fast to 
this better hope, this purer purpose. " If not, be 
it known unto thee, O king, — even if our God is 
not going to deliver us, even if there is no God to 
deHver us, — we will not serve thy false gods, nor 
conform to thy degrading and sensual idolatry." 

When John Bunyan was a prisoner in Bedford 
jail, as he relates afterwards, it lay much upon 
his spirit that his imprisonment might end at the 
gallows for aught that he could tell. Yet it was 
not hanging that he feared so much as that when 
the time came to die he might be left without a 
savor of the things of God, without any evidence 
upon his soul that all was well. " But, even 
so," he said, " 'twas my duty to stand to His word, 
whether He would ever look upon me or no, or 
save me at the last. Wherefore, thought I, the 
point being thus, I am for going on and venturing 
my eternal state with Christ whether I have com- 
fort here or no. If God doth not come in, thought 
I, I will leap off the ladder even blindfolded into 
eternity — sink or swim, come heaven, come hell. 
Lord Jesus, if thou wilt catch me, do ; if not — if 
not, I will venture for Thy name." I do not think 
John Bunyan ever said a finer thing than that in 
the whole Pilgrim's Progress. It ranks him with 
the three Hebrews before Nebuchadnezzar's fiery 
8 



114 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



furnace. " Lord Jesus, if Thou wilt catch me, do ; 
if not, I will venture for Thy name." Something 
like that, I think, must be, generally, the begin- 
ning of a Christian's faith. It is not the end of it ; 
the full assurance may come afterwards, the peace 
of God that passeth understanding, but at the be- 
ginning, to beheve does seem more like a venture. 
" If not, I will still venture." Even in all the un- 
certainty, what we know of Jesus makes Him more 
to be desired, and worthier to be chosen and fol- 
lowed than all that we know beside. As that 
heathen of Galilee says in Gilder's poem : 

*' If Jesus Christ is a man, — 
And only a man, — I say 
That of all mankind I cleave to Him, 
And to Him will I cleave alway. 
If Jesus Christ is a God, — 
And the only God, — I swear 
I will follow Him through heaven and hell. 
The earth, the sea, and the air." 

The faith starts as an if," " if," " if," but it may 
lead at once into a very definite and lasting deter- 
mination of the will. 

In Babylon the test was a literal persecution 
of those who feared Jehovah and would not wor- 
ship idols. Persecution in one of these oriental 
empires is a terribly serious matter ; they are ex- 



"BUT IF NOT" 



115 



perts out there in the art of inflicting pain. The 
fire can be very hot, the king's rage very fierce. 
It is a horror to think what true men and women 
have suffered when they would not fall down and 
worship in accordance with the whim of one of 
those oriental rulers. 

Within the last few years the world has been 
horror-stricken at the report of atrocities in China ; 
but, remember, it is no new thing. " Beloved," 
Peter said to some of the sufferers of his day, 
"think it not strange concerning the fiery trial 
that is to try you, as though some strange thing 
had happened to you." It was not a strange thing 
— not a new thing. It was what had happened 
from the beginning. It happened to all but one 
of our Lord's apostles ; it happened to the Lord 
Himself; and He had said to them, " So perse- 
cuted they the prophets that were before you." 

People say sometimes that missions ought not 
to be maintained where they involve risk of so 
much pain and loss. If they really mean what 
they say, they should counsel their friends to 
be honest only when it promises to be the best 
policy ; they should counsel John Bunyan to yield 
at once to Charles's stupid act of uniformity, and 
the Pilgrim fathers to swallow their scruples and 
never set sail for savage New England; and 



ii6 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 

Luther and Knox and the other reformers to 
keep their perilously unfashionable protest to them- 
selves ; and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, 
to fall down flat before the golden or any other 
image that the king might set up ; and Peter to 
go on denying his Lord ; and Jesus Himself to 
choose the devil's way to the throne instead of 
God's way of the Cross. They would always find, 
and would find to-day, crowds of people ready 
to follow such counsel. But they must cut the 
whole Book of Daniel out of their Bible, and 
many other choice passages also. This Bible 
preserves for us the memory of men and women 
who would not follow such counsel ; they would 
be stoned rather, and sawn asunder, and slain 
with the sword. " The world was not worthy " of 
them. No, the world was not worthy, but the 
presence of such people is the only thing that has 
kept it worth Hving in, or its story worth reading. 
Thank God, there have been two or three who 
could say, " If we are not delivered, be it known 
unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, 
nor worship the golden image which thou hast 
set up." 

" If not," " if not,"— ah, but their God would 
deliver them. The writer of this epic of martyr- 
dom has left no doubt of his conviction on that 



"BUT IF NOT" 



117 



point. If not, they would still be true to Him ; but 
He will, — in this world or in some other. He will. 
When the story is ended, you will find not so 
much as the smell of fire upon their garments. 
Their story, and the story of other brave martyrs 
like them, is one thing that gives us our surest 
confidence in a blessed Hfe beyond for God's ser- 
vants. 

"Where, oh where are the Hebrew children?" 
we sing with our little ones ; and " the Hebrew 
children " mean these three brave Hebrews in 
Babylon — " Safe home in the promised land." 
We know they are safe ; something in our hearts 
tells us they must be safe ; and we go on to say, 
" By and by we'll go home to meet them, safe 
home in the promised land." Their God did de- 
liver them ; He does deliver them ; He will deliver 
them* It may be by the way of a cross ; but it is 
a cross that brings a crown. 



i 



VII 

"THE GATES OF THE CITY" 



VII 



"THE GATES OF THE CITY" 

"On the east three gates; on the north three gates; on the 
south three gates ; and on the west three gates." — Rev. xxi. 13. 

John here describes in vision the New Jerusa- 
lem, Holy City of God; but when we read the 
prophecies of this Book of The Revelation, it 
sometimes occurs to us to ask whether its several 
visions are intended to depict something now in 
heaven, or something that some day shall be on 
earth. It is not always easy to say; but certainly, 
in this case, the Holy City, whether in heaven or 
on earth, stands for the grand consummation of 
all things, the reward for all the labors of God's 
saints, the end of all their hopes and desires, the 
final answer to all their prayers. It is John's 
emblem for that one far-off divine event to which 
creation moves. 

How reassuring it is in these days of rapid 
municipal growth that the inspired symbol of all 
good for mankind should be a city ! For the 
world's cities are now growing so fast, and their 
swift growth brings us so many of our most dis- 

121 



122 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 

tressing and perplexing problems, of health, of 
social life, and of government. From every pleas- 
ant countryside, and from other lands, streams 
of population are flowing into the mammoth city, 
even as the ancient moralist used to complain 
that the Orontes and all the other rivers of the 
East were emptying their polluted waters into 
imperial Rome. Our hearts often grow sick at 
the sights and sounds set before us. We can 
sympathize with poor Cowper as he sang, God 
made the country, man made the town." Yes, 
but in a deeper sense God made the town also ; 
and here our text teaches that the triumphant 
ending of God's entire work of creation and re- 
demption must be depicted as nothing else than a 
city that is compact together, whither the tribes 
go up, the populous capital of a great kingdom, 
a new Jerusalem. That is the BibHcal ideal. As 
Phillips Brooks once said, " The story of revela- 
tion which begins with a garden ends with a city." 

In olden times every real city must have its wall, 
a defense or barrier separating between the safe 
friendliness within and all possible foes and perils 
without. In the case of Jerusalem, it happens 
that the walls are still there, forming a most con- 
spicuous feature of the city. From whatever direc- 
tion you approach Jerusalem, whether you ride up 



"THE GATES OF THE CITY" 123 

from the southwest across the valley of Hinnom, 
and the first view of the ancient capital that bursts 
upon you is of those massive towers and the long 
battlemental rampart crowning the heights of 
Mount Zion; or whether, approaching from the 
north, you draw near to the beautiful Damascus 
Gate, with the long stretch of wall running over 
the hill and out of sight to the right hand and the 
left; or, looking down from the east, from the 
Mount of Olives, upon the old temple area, you see 
its fortification towering at a dizzy height above the 
Kidron Valley ; always a chief part of the impres- 
sion which the city makes upon you will come from 
this massive circuit of its wall. So, if you should 
choose to walk round about the city, outside the 
wall, letting your mind call up the ancient days 
of savage warfare when those great stones were 
set in place, it would be easy to feel that all safety, 
happiness, holiness, and friendliness, must be found 
within that charmed inclosure, and all peril and 
cruel enmity without. 

Of course, it is not so now. The old wall 
stands as a relic of the past — an interesting, his- 
torical memorial of times very unHke our own. 
Really, the open country outside might seem to 
our taste more wholesome and attractive than the 
foul oriental city within. Yet, however antiquated 



124 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



and useless, there the great wall stands ; and it 
stands a most impressive token of a truth which 
is not antiquated, but true eternally. For there 
are — and must be — walls, barriers, between all 
those things which belong in the Holy City of 
God and those other things which never can be 
admitted to it; not, perhaps, a wall of stone and 
mortar, for that is at best a somewhat bungling 
contrivance of separation, often shutting out what 
belongs in, and letting in what ought to be shut 
out. In our modern cities and States, and in the 
whole structure of modern civilized society, we 
have learned to avail ourselves of more searching 
methods of discrimination than any stone wall. 
Those barriers that separate between wholesome 
knowledge and dangerous ignorance, between 
culture and vulgarity, between public health and 
infectious disease, between purity and vice, between 
honesty and crime — the safety of every modern 
city and State depends on such separating lines ; 
and they are vastly more rigid than the stone wall 
of any ancient capital. So, when the apostle saw 
in vision the New Jerusalem, that perfect com- 
monwealth of the saints, which is in heaven, and 
shall be on earth, it was no narrow Jewish preju- 
dice, but a deep prophetic insight which sur- 
rounded the city for him with a wall great and high. 



"THE GATES OF THE CITY" 125 

That city of God does not yet appear on earth, 
but the present visible emblem of it is the Church 
of Jesus Christ ; and one conspicuous feature of 
the Church as first established was its wall sepa- 
rating it from the world. " Come out from among 
them, and be ye separate, and touch not the un- 
clean thing," was always the tone of apostolic 
preaching. " In the world, and yet not of the 
world" ; wicked men surrounding it on every side. 
"And such were ye," the apostle writes to his 
converts ; but now ye are washed, ye are sanc- 
tified ; ye have come out of that defilement and 
into the pure fellowship of the saints, into the 
household of God ; therefore be separate from 
them. The safe and holy city where ye now 
dwell at peace with God must be separated from 
this surrounding wickedness by a great and high 
wall of divine protection and sanctifying grace. 
Make the most of this wall ; be ye separate. 

I say that was the tone of apostoHc preaching ; 
and in our later times, whenever there come sea- 
sons of special rehgious awakening, you will find 
God's people more ready to accept these same 
admonitions as intended for us. The Church of 
God on earth, like the city of God in heaven, 
needs some wall great and high between those 
whom Christ has redeemed and those who still 



126 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



accept the dominion of evil. That was what John 
saw in his vision — a wall great and high ; and that 
is a most important symbol of truth as regards 
the Church of Jesus Christ. 

But John saw also that the wall had twelve 
gates, gates that never were shut; and, by all 
means, we must remember this part of the vision 
— on the east three gates ; on the north three 
gates ; on the south three gates ; and on the west 
three gates. From whatever quarter the weary 
traveler comes, or the panting fugitive, let him not 
be disheartened by the height and massiveness of 
the walls encompassing God's city ; they are for 
his protection, not his exclusion ; for wherever 
he comes from, a gate will stand straight before 
him to receive him : always open, for the gates 
of that city " shall not be shut at all by day, and 
there shall be no night there." 

Now what does this part of the symbol mean ? 
What would it mean to a Christian of John's day 
if he had stood by the literal Jerusalem and had 
seen gates opening on every side ? 

" On the east three gates." I think that meant 
for John that the religion of Jesus held its doors 
open for all the men of the East. Christianity was 
one of the oriental religions. It had and it has 
room in abundance for that great continent of Asia, 



'THE GATES OF THE CITY" 127 



those regions of the earth where people lived when 
the earth was young ; when our whole race was 
in its childhood ; when men used to look upon the 
heavens and the earth with the large-eyed wonder 
of little children, rather than with the careful cal- 
culation of our maturer humanity. That is Asia. 
And there is room for Asia, and the whole of 
it, in the city of God. The first Epiphany was 
through the ministry of the wise men who went 
back to their own place in the East. Let our 
missionaries take their largest invitations east- 
ward ; they cannot outmeasure that of Christ ; for 
three is the perfect number ; and " on the east are 
three gates." 

"And on the north three gates." As John 
looked northward he would have seen those 
hardy northern nations who in his day were just 
beginning to stir themselves in their great German 
forests; and Rome trembled at the exhibition 
of their unexhausted and incalculable energy. 
Rome was very big, but not big enough to make 
room for all these northern barbarians. But John 
knew there was room for them, and for all of 
them, in the Church of Jesus Christ. In the six- 
teenth century, when a young German named 
Luther takes his stand against the world, we shall 
learn how Christianity has united its own strength 



128 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



with those lusty barbarians for the glory of God 
and the good of men. " On the north three gates." 

" On the south three gates." As John turned 
toward the south he would see those softer 
tropical races who, lacking the stimulus of win- 
ter's cold and want, have spent their lives in a 
kind of perpetual infancy, never outgrowing the 
follies and fickleness and unthinking cruelties of 
little children, never reaching the robust vigor 
and virtue of manhood. A very low type of 
people. But there is room even for them in the 
Church of Jesus Christ. That Ethiopian whom 
Philip saw riding in his chariot will be one of the 
earliest of Gentile converts and messengers. Those 
savage children of Africa, or of the islands of the 
Southern Seas, were not beneath the Saviour's all- 
embracing compassion ; and there must be some 
special provision for welcoming them into the 
freedom of His city. " On the south three gates." 

" And on the west three gates." What would 
John see as he looked westward, out beyond the 
pillars of Hercules ? Whether he saw it or not, 
the Star of Empire would go that way. A mighty 
civilization would be developed by the northern 
peoples when they turned their faces westward ; 
there lie the nations of modern Europe, Eng- 
land, with its empire, America. This west — with 



"THE GATES OF THE CITY" 129 



its commerce, its greed for gold, its inquisitive 
science, its secularism and materialism, the roar 
of its mills and railroads and steamships ; a civiH- 
zation so fearfully complex, offering the sharpest 
possible contrast to those simple conditions of 
life among which Christ and His disciples had 
founded the infant Church. Yet within that 
Church room must be found for the west. Paul, 
the first great missionary, will steadfastly set his 
face westward toward Italy and Spain. All these 
amazing developments of the last few centuries 
were not omitted from the divine view when God 
was preparing salvation for the world. He in- 
cluded them all in the architectural plan of His 
great city. " On the west three gates," 

Oh, what a magnificent picture the inspired seer 
has set before us of that city whose builder and 
maker is God — that city which God is preparing 
for all His children ! Not the old Jerusalem, 
capital of the Httle Jewish state, a city once highly 
favored, but selfish and unfaithful, and her glory 
soon to pass away ; but the new Jerusalem, a city 
of more generous magnitude ; for the nations of 
them which are saved shall walk in the light of it, 
and the kings of the earth do bring their glory 
and honor into it ; and its wall is great and high, 
to shut out from it everything that defileth, and 

9 



I30 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 

worketh abomination, and maketh a lie. But in 
the wall there are twelve gates, and they shall not 
be shut at all — on the east three, and on the north 
three, on the south three, and on the west three. 

It is the heavenly Jerusalem, that city which 
does not yet appear on earth ; but every true 
church of Jesus Christ should stand as a copy 
of it, like the ancient tabernacle, being made after 
the pattern which has been shown us in the 
Mount. As we have seen, a wall surrounds every 
church — a wall of scrupulous separation from the 
pride and greed and selfish ambition and cruel, 
corrupting pleasures of a godless world ; but the 
wall must be furnished with ever-open gates, 
opening on every side — on the east, on the north, 
on the south, and on the west. For our text 
does not stand alone ; it only gathers up into one 
expressive symbol a multitude of great and pre- 
cious promises and invitations from God's word. 
So what would it mean for this Church to hold its 
gates open on every side ? 

" On the east three gates." It is not pressing 
the figure too far to say that every true church 
must still hold its doors wide open toward the 
regions of the sun-rising, where the children live 
who still look upon the heavens and the earth 
with the same large-eyed wonder as of old, where 



'THE GATES OF THE CITY" 131 



the dew is not off the grass and the freshness of 
earth's dehghts has not yet been scorched and 
withered by the burning heat of noontime ; the 
region of primeval mystery, the East, old as Eden, 
but still to be found in every home which has a 
nursery or a cradle. Toward this great sunrise 
continent, with its boundless populations, — more 
than half the people of the earth, — toward all these 
innumerable little children, every true church 
of Jesus Christ must hold its doors wide open. 
Three gates — the perfect number, the largest, 
freest preparation for welcoming them all in ; the 
seal of baptism placed upon their foreheads ; the 
tender watchfulness and earnest prayer of father 
and mother and all who love them best at home ; 
the careful nurture of Sunday school and mission 
band, and anything and everything that may en- 
courage the steps of these little children into the 
paths of Christian service and train their lips to 
Christian confession and praise. When our Saviour 
said, " Suffer the little children to come unto me, 
and forbid them not " ; when He said, " Except ye 
be converted and become as little children, ye 
cannot enter into the kingdom of God," He was 
announcing with all possible emphasis that every 
true church of His must have three gates, and 
three gates always open toward the sunrise. 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



" On the north three gates." The north, where 
John saw the formidable young nations ; it is 
the region of boundless, inexhaustible energy. It 
is the youth of Wordsworth's poem, who " daily 
further from the east must travel, but still is 
nature's priest, and by the vision splendid is on 
his way attended." The young men and young 
women, no longer little children, but not yet arrived 
at the hot noontide of middle age, possessing not 
much of the treasures of experience — there is 
something barbarous in their unreasoning hope 
and exuberant vitality — no limit to their strength, 
and no guessing how they will use it. It might 
be in some disastrous Gothic invasion, like those 
which wrecked the ancient Roman world; it 
might be in some awful French Revolution, like 
that of a hundred years ago, or any other out- 
break of delirious enthusiasm and unbridled pas- 
sion. For the north is a stormy region. We 
are afraid of these young men. Old Charlemagne 
wept when he first saw the sails of the Northmen. 
Yet, for good or for ill, the future of the world is 
with them. The strength is theirs ; the hope is 
theirs; the possibilities of romantic heroism are 
theirs. All the elements of life are still unex- 
hausted with them. The Church of Jesus Christ 
unshrinkingly holds her doors wide open toward 



"THE GATES OF THE CITY' 



all these terrible young men and young women. 
The very first disciples were a company of young 
men. The greeting of an apostle was, " I have 
written unto you, young men, because ye are 
strong," " On the north three gates." 

It does not say that these young people must 
first circumambulate the city and beg an entrance 
at the eastern gates, or at the western gates, where 
they do not belong. It does not say that these 
young men must try to pass themselves off deceit- 
fully for ignorant babies, or for exhausted patri- 
archs ; but as young men they are welcome in 
the Church of God. The directest way stands 
open for them from what they now are, out in the 
world, under the dangerous leadership of passion 
and pride, to what Christ would have them to be 
when they have accepted His gracious mastery. 
" On the north three gates." 

On the south three gates." The south. When 
you turn your face that way, you are looking 
toward those regions of the earth where the 
creation of man might be charged with failure; 
where the inferior races live — soft, nerveless, igno- 
rant, idle, vicious, without ambition; not truly 
childHke, but childish ; humanity in its most hope- 
less degradation. Men will tell us of the " white 
man's burden," and argue, with some reason, that 



134 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 

unless the stronger races of the north are willing 
to assume some responsibility for these degenerate 
children of the south, and to help carry their bur- 
den for them, there can be no hope of better things 
for them. But you do not need to travel to Africa, 
or the islands of the Southern Seas for these speci- 
mens of human failure ; they are about us every- 
where — the criminal classes, the vicious classes ; 
many of them born so, our statisticians tell us ; 
men and women congenitally predestined to vice 
and crime. 

Now, how will the Church of Jesus Christ bear 
herself toward this sad problem ? ** On the south 
three gates." There is the answer; that is the 
pattern showed us on the Mount. If we would 
be true to the heavenly pattern, we must beware 
how we ever fail to hold those three southern 
gates of the city wide open — three of them; as 
many for the south as for the east, or for the 
north ; as wide an entrance and as friendly a wel- 
come for some discouraged drunkard or outcast 
as for the purest little child or the most hopefully 
ambitious young man. No one would claim that 
we have ever succeeded in copying that pattern 
very perfectly ; it is hard to copy. But that is the 
pattern set us by our Lord's precepts, and abun- 
dantly reenforced by His own example ; He was 



"THE GATES OF THE CITY" 135 



so tenderly compassionate toward sinful men and 
women and so strangely hopeful for them. The 
publicans and sinners, if they were willing to 
enter, could be so sure of a welcome when Christ 
Himself stood at the door. " On the south three 
gates." 

But how about the west, whither the Star of 
Empire turned when those strong young German 
races grew older and more knowing ? In some 
ways the world makes its best showing out here 
in the west ; this is the ripe maturity of the world's 
day. But that means that the shadows are length- 
ening ; the sunset will come after a while, and the 
day will be ended. It is a serious thought that 
civilization reaches a kind of period in this western 
continent. If we fail here, the earth affords no 
room for further experiments. It is a serious 
matter for any man when his own day passes the 
meridian. He has reached middle age, and hence- 
forth begins to grow old. The shadows are 
lengthening, and will lengthen faster and faster 
until sunset comes, and " evening star, and after 
that the dark." Of course, age has some advan- 
tages of its own. The old man knows more than 
the boy, and he generally owns more ; he has 
shaken off some illusions, outgrown some of his 
earlier follies, moved beyond the reach of certain 



136 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



kinds of temptation, grown dexterous in certain 
convenient habits of work and decent behavior. 
Age is a good time for carrying his enterprises 
forward toward completion, for writing the last 
chapters of his book, rounding out his fortune, per- 
fecting his invention. But every one knows what 
a bad time old age is for making beginnings. Can 
an old beggar acquire the habits of steady indus- 
try? Can an old thief attain the reputation or 
maintain the virtue of honesty ? Can an old dunce 
ever grow wise ? Or, even when these older men 
have fallen victims to misfortune without fault of 
their own — is there anywhere a more pathetic sight 
than an old merchant looking hopelessly for a 
place in a store, or an old preacher looking for a 
charge ? The world's cities seem to have no en- 
trance gates in their western wall. 

Now what attitude shall the Church of Jesus 
Christ take toward the old men and the old 
women who are still without the wall — those who 
have passed all the days of their lives without 
ever beginning to beHeve and confess ? " On the 
west three gates." That is the answer. Just as 
cordial a welcome, just as free an entrance for the 
most discouraged old man, if only he will come, 
as for the hopeful youth or the happy little child. 
For you remember our Lord's parable, " It was 



"THE GATES OF THE CITY" 137 



about the eleventh hour that the householder 
went out and found others idle, and saith unto 
them, Why stand ye here all the day idle ? And 
when they answered that no man had hired them, 
he saith unto them, Go ye also into the vineyard, 
and whatsoever is right that shall ye receive." 

" Oh, there is a wideness in God's mercy like 
the wideness of the sea." Who can measure 
it? Who can measure the all-embracing com- 
passion of Jesus Christ ? Who can set limits to 
the versatile hospitaHty of the city of God ? Since 
these gates of the city do stand so wide open for 
all sorts and conditions and races and ages of 
men, why should any of us refuse longer to enter 
in ? " The Spirit and the bride say, Come. And 
let him that heareth say, Come. And let him 
that is athirst come ; and whosoever will let him 
take the water of life freely." " On the east three 
gates ; on the north three gates ; on the south 
three gates ; and on the west three gates." 



VIII 

THE HOME OF THE SOUL 



VIII 



THE HOME OF THE SOUL 

" Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations," 
— Psalm xc. i. 

A DWELLING PLACE, and that means home; and 
there is hardly a word in our language, or in any 
language, that means more than home. It means 
the safest place for us, the best known place, the 
place that always stays the same, the place where 
our dearest ones live with us, where our life 
began and where we instinctively hope that it 
may end. Sometimes we chose to leave it for 
a while. We used to run out of doors gladly 
when the sun was shining and we felt strong and 
well. In our more venturesome moods we would 
attempt larger excursions over the hills. But all 
the time we must be sure that we could be safe 
home again at night fall when we were tired. It 
grows cold outside and the right place to be is 
before the blazing fire at home. There come 
fierce storms of rain or snow outside and the 
place to be is safe indoors at home. If ever we 
were sick, in pain, hurt by some one's unkindness, 

141 



142 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



lonely because of the great world's neglect, — oh, 
then we thanked God if anywhere in all the world 
there was for us some place of refuge that we 
could call home. I am speaking of what life 
meant to us when we were little children, years 
and years ago. 

When we grew older life became more com- 
plicated and artificial, and our own feelings were 
somewhat benumbed by the multitude of new 
thoughts and ambitions, and then many of us were 
willing to wander farther from the old dwelling 
place. Our journeys were longer and more fre- 
quent, and at times we seemed not to have much 
thought of ever coming back; we seemed birds 
of passage without need of any home at all. 

But the old nature was in us still, and a very 
little thing would be enough to wake it up — a dis- 
appointment, a failure, a single touch of sickness, 
some strain of an old song, some old picture 
discovered in the bottom of the drawer — and sud- 
denly the grown man finds himself as homesick 
as a five-year-older could be. Only the malady, 
when it strikes him now, is more desperate than 
in the earlier days ; for now where is his home ? 
He has lived at one time or another in a score of 
houses ; many old friends have passed out of his 
life ; his parents, one or both of them dead per- 



THE HOME OF THE SOUL 143 



haps ; his brothers and sisters scattered — perhaps 
it had been easier if some of them were dead; 
other new friends have come into his Hfe, and 
some of them Hve here, some there ; so that many 
houses have grown a Httle homeHke to him. But 
what one place is there in all the world that 
can mean for him now so much of home as his 
father's house used to mean when he was a boy ? 

Still the word " home " does mean much even 
to the oldest of us. A homeless man or woman, 
a man without a country, always seems to us one 
of the most pitiable of creatures. This lot seems 
to us the opposite of all that human life ought 
to be. He is always exposed to danger, lone- 
liness, bewildering change, strangeness. 

This Ninetieth Psalm, according to its title, is 
the prayer of Moses, the man of God. Certainly 
the Psalm would be worthy of such a writer and 
well suited to such an occasion. That wilderness 
episode in Israel's life meant that they had no 
home. They were always moving, moving — all 
the year, and then another year, for forty years. 
Never settling down at home, always moving — you 
might well call such an experience a wilderness. 
Old Egypt, the land of bondage, had been bad 
enough ; but, at least, there were homes in Egypt ; 
and no wonder if at times the people longed to 



144 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



turn back into Egypt. Homes had been prom- 
ised in Canaan, but that promise was for the 
benefit of their children. These adult Israelites 
through one long forlorn generation must be 
always moving. And the long-continued home- 
lessness taught them something. For all time to 
come the memory of that homeless wilderness 
would make them value the homes that God 
should give them in Canaan. 

So for us, every journey that we ever have to 
take abroad, every enforced or voluntary change 
of place, may still teach us some of the same 
lessons that the Israelites learned from their wan- 
derings in the wilderness. 

But the passage of time also teaches some of 
these lessons. Go back in after years to the old 
house that you once called home, after that house 
has passed into the hands of strangers, and see 
how much it means to you now of what it used 
to mean then. There may be one particular 
house still standing in some distant city which 
once for a little while meant more than all the 
rest of the world to some one of you. It was the 
earliest home that you can remember ; but years 
ago — twenty, thirty, perhaps forty years ago — 
you and yours moved out of it. Who may have 
lived in it since you do not know. The old 



THE HOME OF THE SOUL 145 



house may stand there entirely unchanged to out- 
ward appearance. There is the doorstep on 
which you used to play, the iron balcony before 
the parlor window, the dark passage leading 
through to the area, the nursery windows above — 
can you not see it all ? I can ; not one brick or 
windowpane changed; and your heart is always 
tenderly moved toward what used to be your home. 
But you have never once set foot inside of it for 
forty years, and now probably never will. It is 
no home now ; there is no shelter there for you, 
no dear companionship. You can travel back, if 
you choose, to the old house. The barriers of 
space now separating you from that home of your 
childhood could be passed over any day in a few 
hours, but the barriers of time separating you 
from it are insuperable. Go to-morrow and walk 
up the old street, mount the old steps, enter the 
old door — you have not reached the old home, 
for that is still forty years away. 

A graduate of some years' standing goes back 
to his college, or tries to ; but has he really come 
back ? Is this the old college ? The city bears 
the same name on the map, and the streets about 
the campus bear the same names as when he used 
to walk them. Some few of the buildings fit into 
places in his mental picture. But where are the 
10 



146 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



men, his dear associates in work and play ? He 
counts himself happy now if he can find one or 
two of their children in the old halls. 

Ah, friends, this journey of time that we are 
always making is the irrevocable journey. We 
might travel back over a thousand leagues of 
space; we cannot travel back over one moment 
of time. This is the stern compulsion which has 
always been unsetthng us, ostracizing us, making 
homeless exiles of us. We step into each new 
day of our lives as a company of immigrants. 
The old country — that dear yesterday where we 
thought we had a home — has been left forever 
behind. We never shall see its shores again. 
We have crossed the broad ocean of the night; 
and here we are, disembarking in a strange land, 
to make a new home in it, if we can. 

This is the pathos of human life. This is what 
has always made those wilderness wanderings of 
ancient Israel seem like a type of man's story on 
earth ; it is this ceaseless journey of time. Even 
though a man should spend the whole period of 
threescore years and ten without ever moving a 
hundred miles from the spot where he was born, 
he moves as swiftly as the rest down this river of 
time, and, therefore, can find no continuing city, 
no spot which he can go on calling home. Even 



THE HOME OF THE SOUL 



147 



after the Israelites had crossed over into Canaan, 
and found cities for habitation, they would still be 
moved to sing or wail this Ninetieth Psalm : " We 
spend our years as a tale that is told." " Thou 
earnest them away as with a flood ; they are as a 
sleep : in the morning they are Hke grass which 
groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth, and 
groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and 
withereth." 

How pathetic it is to watch the efforts of men 
when they have tried to turn back or check the 
current of this river of time ! We appoint our 
commemorative anniversaries, links holding us to 
the past. We band ourselves together in ancestral 
societies. We build monuments to the heroes 
that have been. We make pilgrimages to old 
houses and old shrines. We try in all ways and 
by all means to attach ourselves to something 
fixed, something that even time cannot change. 
If we can find anywhere some structure like those 
great pyramids of Egypt which have really stood 
unmoved and immovable from before the time 
when Moses sang this psalm, we begin to exult 
in the discovery, as if now with our own hand we 
had been able to lay hold upon the satisfying 
homelike changelessness of eternity. But in a 
moment we draw back shuddering ; for the great 



148 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



monument, when we touch it, proves to be nothmg 
but a grave ; the chill of death is there ; nothing 
like a home for any living man. The vast pyramid 
itself is not big enough to dam up any part of the 
channel of time's river, or to make that current 
run more slowly for one living human being. 

So we feel ourselves exiles still, wanderers, 
awaking every morning on the further unfamiliar 
shore of a boundless sea. A home is what we 
want ; who will give us a home that we can keep ? 

The psalmist connects this homelessness of 
man with his sin. " Thou hast set our iniquities 
before Thee, our secret sins in the light of Thy 
countenance " ; therefore " we spend our years as 
a tale that is told." Of course the old history of 
Exodus declares that this was the reason why the 
people and Moses himself were compelled to wear 
out their lives in the wilderness ; it was because 
of sinful unbelief Always it is a deplorable con- 
sequence of sin that it estranges men, isolates 
them from God and also from each other. The 
prodigal's selfishness soon drives him along that 
journey into the far country ; and the most deso- 
late picture of the final ruin of sin is in those 
words which our Saviour used to speak so sor- 
rowfully, " the outer darkness." Abraham, Isaac, 
and Jacob, and all the prophets would be gath- 



THE HOME OF THE SOUL 



149 



ered in the home ; and many more coming to sit 
down with them from east and w^est and north 
and south ; all sitting down at the family feast ; 
but there would be some left outside homeless, in 
the outer darkness. It was their sin that had shut 
them out, their selfishness and pride and angry 
rejection of God's goodness. That is what sin is 
always doing, in this world as well as in the world 
to come : it shuts men out. Selfishness, pride, 
malice, uncharitableness, distrust, — they shut a 
man out from home, from any home, from every 
home. Suppose you see one of these poor home- 
less wretches and offer him your hospitality. 
You may even try to force it upon him ; you open 
the door of your house and call and beckon to 
him as he stands shivering out in the cold and 
storm and dark. You may even catch hold of his 
body, and drag his body in through the door, and 
sit his body in the easiest chair before the blazing 
fire, or push his body up to the table, bidding him 
eat. But so long as that strange, cold, distant 
spirit dwells in him, whatever you do with his 
body, he, the man, is still outside in the cold and 
storm and dark, and your friendliest hospitality 
cannot reach him. 

This Book tells how the kind Father of all sent 
His own Son to those who were shivering in the 



I50 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



outer darkness of sin, that He might invite and 
draw them into the house ; but if they would not 
be persuaded, even the Son of God could not 
bring them in. Such a man carries the gloom of 
the outer darkness as a prison wall about him 
wherever he goes. Which way shall I fly ? " 
Milton's Satan cries ; " Which way I fly is hell, 
myself am hell." And what the poet called Satan 
was only a putting together of various things that 
he had discerned in the sinful heart of man. 

Henry Drummond says that " no worse fate 
can befall a man in this world than to live and 
grow old alone, unloving and unloved. To be 
lost is to live loveless and unloved." It is the 
outer darkness, that curse of eternal homelessness. 

Hawthorne, in one of his stories, tells of a 
young girl, an artist at Rome, who felt such a 
curse falling upon her, not for sin of her own, but 
because she had witnessed another's crime. "This 
awful loneHness enveloped her whithersoever she 
went. It was a shadow in the sunshine of festal 
days ; a mist between her eyes and the picture at 
which she strove to look ; a chill dungeon, which 
kept her in its gray twilight and fed her with its 
unwholesome air." Afterwards, when she found 
words to tell another her trouble, she said : " I 
am a motherless girl, and a stranger here in Italy. 



THE HOME OF THE SOUL 151 



I had only God to take care of me and be my 
closest friend ; and the terrible crime thrust itself 
between Him and me ; so that I groped for Him 
in the darkness, as it were, and found Him not ; 
found nothing but a dreadful sohtude, and this 
crime in the midst of it." For a Httle while, suffer- 
ing for another's sin, the poor girl felt the horror 
of the outer darkness faUing about her. 

Now this is the explanation that the psalmist 
gives of the sad homelessness of human life — all 
these weary, aimless wanderings through a thirsty 
wilderness— it is because of sin. 

There was a home all the while; there is a 
home always ready for all ; its doors always open, 
its table always spread ; the very servants in that 
home have bread enough and to spare ; but we 
in our lonely exile were perishing with hunger 
because of our sin. 

What, then, was the home that we might have 
enjoyed except for our sin ? Our text gives the 
answer. " Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling- 
place." " Before the mountains were brought 
forth, or ever Thou hast formed the earth and 
the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, 
Thou art God." Thou, God, art our dwelling- 
place, our home. 

What a beautiful thought that was to come into 



152 



FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



the mind of one of those exiles in the wilderness ! 
What comfort it brought him ! No matter now, 
though he was condemned to spend the days of 
his earthly life wandering in that solitary way, 
finding no city to dwell in, hungry and thirsty, his 
soul fainting in him ; no better shelter than the 
black tents of the Bedouin ; always on the go ; 
breaking camp every morning, and moving on as 
if with the fate of the wandering Jew himself; 
never entering Canaan, only looking over into that 
country of homes. It was no great matter ; for 
when once Moses had learned this blessed secret 
of faith, he was no more an exile. The dry wil- 
derness itself had grown dear and homelike to 
him, for His God was there ; and God was his 
dwelling-place ; he lived and moved and had his 
being in God ; and he knew it at last, and in the 
knowledge of it was blessed. 

All the best things that other men look for in 
the earthly home this man could find in God. 
We love our home because it is the safest place ; 
but surely that man who had discovered that he 
was living in God was safe, knew that he was 
safe ; he had almost a direct consciousness of 
safety, and could " endure as seeing the invisible." 
We love our home because it is the best known 
place to us, the place that has grown dear and 



THE HOME OF THE SOUL 



153 



familiar, that does not change ; where those whom 
we love best live with us ; where our life began 
and we should hope that it might end. But 
surely God had become all that to this man ; in 
all these ways God was his home. No change 
of place could take him away from God. If he 
ascended into heaven, he would find God there. 
If it were possible that some fierce enemy seize 
him and drag him down to hell, his dear home 
would be waiting to shelter him there. If he took 
the wings of the morning and dwelt in the utter- 
most parts of the sea, his home is there. No 
change of place could pull him away from home. 

Neither could any change of time. From ever- 
lasting to everlasting his home stands firm. "A 
thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday 
when it is past, and as a watch in the night." 
Before the first stone of the pyramids was laid ; 
before the mountains were brought forth ; and 
after they all have gone, and the earth and the 
heavens, " Thou art from everlasting to everlast- 
ing " our home. He was the God of the fathers, 
of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob. He shall be 
the God of the children. The generations are all 
bound safely together in Him. Even time, which 
destroys all things else, has no power to harm 
the man who has found his home in God. 



154 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 



Oh, what a comforting faith that would be ! 
What a subHme prayer it is that comes down to 
us from the sohtudes of that Arab desert ! If we 
could only hope to have a faith like it in these 
modern times, and in this western world. 

Ah, but we can ! We who have once heard the 
voice of Jesus ought to know better than Moses 
himself how much the words meant when he 
called the Lord his dwelling place, his home. 
For Jesus made it his life-work to seek out those 
who were lonely and bring them to their home in 
God. And Jesus knew how. He had a large 
experience in homelessness. It began as soon as 
He was born. Mary was far away from the famil- 
iar Nazareth home when Jesus was born. There 
was no room for them even in the inn ; the Holy 
Family were a kind of shelterless outcasts in 
Bethlehem. When He began his ministry no 
earthly home went with the office ; " the foxes 
have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; 
but the Son of man hath not where to lay his 
head." Even when He died, it was in another's 
grave, a borrowed grave, that they laid His body 
away. Homeless Himself, by his own experience 
He was able to feel for all who are homeless and 
lonely. He has felt for them ; He has been show- 
ing his sympathy ever since, and teaching them 



THE HOME OF THE SOUL 



55 



to find their home in God, to rest in a sense of a 
Father's care. 

Moreover, Jesus has bound many of these poor 
souls together in the new human fellowship of His 
Church, by the love that they all feel for Him ; He 
has breathed His own Spirit into their hearts, 
saying, " I am with you alway, even unto the end 
of the world " ; so that He shall live in them, and 
they in Him, forever. 

How beautiful it is to read the testimonies of 
those who have received from Jesus Christ this 
gift of a home with Him, a home in God. Peter 
writes to his friends about Jesus Christ, " Whom 
having not seen, ye love ; in whom, though now ye 
see Him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy 
unspeakable and full of glory." John says, " If 
we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His 
love is perfected in us. Hereby know we that we 
dwell in Him, and He in us, because He hath given 
us of His Spirit." It was John too who could see 
that vision, partly of heaven and partly of earth, 
when " the tabernacle of God is with men, and He 
will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, 
and God himself shall be with them, and be their 
God." In the Epistle to the Hebrews we read 
that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and to- 
day, and forever, and also the promise : " He hath 



156 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 

said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee. So 
that we may boldly say, The Lord is my helper, and 
I will not fear what man shall do unto me." And 
Paul, — Paul who felt himself the chief of sinners, 
who had been forgiven much and therefore loved 
much, — is very bold, and dared to say : " I 
live ; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." He said, 
" I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor 
angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things 
present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, 
nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us 
from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our 
Lord." Ah, that man had found a home which 
would go with him always and everywhere ! No 
change of place, nor of time could part him from it. 
Nothing could rob him of its safe shelter and com- 
forting endearments. For life or death, for time or 
for eternity, his Saviour had given him a home in 
God. 

How much farther these Christians had gone in 
their knowledge of this subject than Moses with 
his psalm could go ! A single gleam of inspiration 
flashed upon him ; one vision from the mountain 
top ; by one tremendous effort of faith he cried, 
" Lord, thou hast been our dwelHng-place " ; but 
that is all. As if exhausted by the effort he sinks 
back, and the rest of the psalm goes on in a 



THE HOME OF THE SOUL 



157 



minor key to set forth all the melancholy cir- 
cumstances of our human need. On the moun- 
tain he saw God ; then the vision passes, and 
he is on the plain again. 

But these disciples of Jesus can go on talking 
of their dear refuge in God all the day long, 
through the whole chapter — almost as one would 
speak of a common earthly home. He is with 
them in the plain ; and by a thousand homely 
figures and instances they tell us how their Lord 
has been ever with them, to keep them safe and 
to make them glad. 

So that is the refuge we all may have, and we 
all need it sorely. We are like a company of 
travelers, wandering on homeless, whither we do 
not know. This day slips by quickly while we 
talk about it ; and then comes the dark, and then 
perhaps another day ; but we enter it as strangers 
in a strange land. Yet it is our privilege, if we 
will trust the promise of Jesus, to move on into 
this strange new country as cheerful and fearless 
as some little child at home, who sees above him 
the roof and all about him the safe walls of his 
father's house. Lord, from everlasting to ever- 
lasting Thou art God, and Thou art our dwelling 
place, our home 



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